ARIADNE – a scientific navigator to find your way through the resource labyrinth

Abstract

Performing high-quality research is a challenging endeavor, especially for early career researchers (ECRs). Most research is characterized by an experiential learning approach, which can be time-consuming, error-prone, and frustrating. While most institutions provide a selection of resources to help researchers with their research projects, these resources are often expensive, spread out, hard to find, and difficult to compare with one another in terms of reliability, validity, usability, and practicability. A comprehensive overview of resources that are useful for early career researchers and their supervisors is missing. To address this issue, we created ARIADNE – a living and interactive resource navigator that helps to use and search a dynamically updated database of resources. The open-access database covers a constantly growing list of resources that are useful for each step of a research project, ranging from the planning and designing of study, over the collection and analysis of the data, to the writing and disseminating of findings. By introducing ARIADNE to the research community, we provide 1) a step-by-step guide on how to perform a research project, 2) an overview on resources that are useful at the different steps of such a project, and 3) a glossary of most common terms surrounding the research cycle. By focusing on open-access and open-source resources, we level the playing field for researchers from underprivileged countries or institutions, thereby facilitating open, fair, and reproducible research in the field of neuroscience.