The recent move of funding agencies towards requiring researchers to deposit primary data alongside publications of funded research has increased the amount of primary data available to individual researchers, and a smart scientist uses all available information!  When faced with databases of structures and properties, though, students are not always certain as to which contain primary data and which are presenting data previously published in other sources.  This presentation focuses on the use of curated crystallography databases in a classroom setting and examines three different concepts that they can help present to students.  First, since they are primary data repositories that contain the actual endproducts of a chemist's research, rather than indexer-interpreted data, they can be used as a case study in data curation and management.  Second, the fact that they are curated can be used to initiate a conversation about critically evaluated data, data trustworthiness, and the ways in which providing access to one's primary data encourages reproducibility and discorages fraud.  Finally, they offer an opportunity to examine structural representation and techniques of structure-based searching in a classroom setting.

Examining research data through a crystal lens: Teaching students about primary data, data representation, and data management using crystal structure databases

2019 Fall National Meeting

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