Data Cleaning with OpenRefine for Ecologists

By Cam Macdonell, Deborah Paul, Phillip Doehle, Rachel Lombardi.
Analysis Data Education Open Scholarship Tools and Technologies Reproducibility Research Data Management Tools Researchers

Abstract

A part of the data workflow is preparing the data for analysis. Some of this involves data cleaning, where errors in the data are identified and corrected or formatting made consistent. This step must be taken with the same care and attention to reproducibility as the analysis. OpenRefine (formerly Google Refine) is a powerful free and open source tool for working with messy data: cleaning it and transforming it from one format into another. This lesson will teach you to use OpenRefine to effectively clean and format data and automatically track any changes that you make. Many people comment that this tool saves them literally months of work trying to make these edits by hand.

Link to resource: https://datacarpentry.org/OpenRefine-ecology-lesson/

Type of resources: Module

Education level(s): Graduate / Professional

Primary user(s): student, teacher

Subject area(s): Computer Science, Information Science, Measurement and Data

Language(s): English