Managing Research the Wiki Way: A Systematic Approach to Documenting Research

TL;DR

This paper advocates for a systematic, wiki-based approach to research documentation, emphasizing its importance for effective management, reproducibility, and insights, especially for doctoral students.

Contribution

It introduces a practical, wiki-driven methodology for organizing research materials and demonstrates how automation can enhance meta-analysis and insights.

Findings

Wiki-based documentation improves research organization

Automated meta-analysis yields better insights

Preconfigured tools facilitate adoption

Abstract

As a master's student, knowing how to manage your personal research is not only useful for keeping track of your work, but it is also a process that should be learned as a part of your training. As a doctoral student, however, research management is a fundamental part of your overall methodology and it should be a well-planned process. Long-term research requires a good approach to documentation, otherwise you risk getting lost among your many surveyed papers, carried experiments, and results. This approach should be systematic, accessible (mainly to you), low-effort, and a natural part of your daily workflow - it should be there to help you, and not the other way around. In this article, we describe how we relied on a wiki to organize literature, datasets, experiments and results, and we also show how such a systematic approach can lead to better insights through automated meta-analysis. In addition to this content, we provide a docker-based installation of a preconfigured wiki, with the required templates and extensions, along with some examples pages, as well as a Jupyter notebook to analyze your documented work. So read on.