Research Workflows

It may be helpful to think of your research process as a workflow or cycle composed of smaller iterative cycles nested within your broader approach.

This is an example of a basic, simplified model (Figure 1) - moving from your initial discovery process (including idea generation and searching for information), to data collection, then analysis, writing up results, publication, and lastly a consideration of outreach and impact of your work.

However, real workflows are never this simple.

Figure 2 shows an example of more complex, iterative model Bosman & Kramer (2016). You can see how multiple cycles nest within the larger cycle as each aspect of the workflow requires revisions, edits, clarifying experiments, etc.

Here is an even more realistic view of what your day to day workflow might look like:

Thomas Van Hoey, a graduate student in linguistics, took an honest look at his own workflow, which is probably a better representation of how most of us get through the day Van Hoey (2020).

A workflow does not exist on its own, but is made of choices - which software, applications and products to use; how do they work together effectively; how open and reproducible are they; and what makes sense for a given task, subject domain or project.

The following image comes from Bosman and Kramer’s 2016 survey Bosman & Kramer (2016) of 20,000 researchers worldwide to give you a sense of how products sync to comprise a hypothetical workflow.

As you go through these tutorials, we hope you gain a better sense of what tools are available for you here at Berkeley and how you can connect them thoughtfully to your preferred workflows.