A Quality Assurance

Quality assurance and quality control (QA/QC) is a critical step that is used to ensure the validity of data in the database and of the analyses that use these data. When conducting QA/QC, your data access level needs to be elevated to “manager”.

1. Open citation in Mendeley
2. Locate citation in BETYdb
   • Select Use
   • Select Show
   • Check that author, year, title, journal, volume, and page information is correct
   • Check that links to URL and PDF are correct, using DOI if available
   • If any information is incorrect, click ’edit’ to correct
3. Check that site(s) at bottom of citation record match site(s) in paper
   • Check that latitude and longitude are consistent with manuscript, are in decimals not degrees, and have appropriate level of precision
   • Click on site name to verify any additional information site information that is present
   • Enter any additional site level information that is found
4. Select treatments from menu bar
   • Check that there is a control treatment
   • Ensure that treatment name and definition are consistent with information in the manuscript
   • Under “treatments from all citations associated with associated sites”, ensure that there is no redundancy (i.e. if another citation uses the same treatments, it should not be listed separately)
   • If managements are listed, make sure that managment-treatment associations are correct
5. Check managements if there are any listed on the treatments page.
   • If yield data has been collected, ensure that required managements have been entered
   • If managements have been entered, ensure that they are associated with the correct treatments
6. Click Yields or Traits to check data.
   • Check that means, sample size, and statistics have been entered correctly
   • If data has been transformed, check that transformation was correct in the associated google spreadsheet (or create a new google spreadsheet following instructions)
   • For any trait data that requires a covariate