Preparing a Documentation Package

A useful final documentation package should be understandable to someone who was not involved in daily study operations. It should explain what the dataset contains, how it was created, how variables are defined, how missing values are represented, how derived variables were produced, and what restrictions apply. A practical documentation package may use this structure: The README should describe the package contents. The data dictionary should define the original database fields. The codebook should define the final dataset. The derived variable specification should explain calculations. The cleaning log should summarize major data quality checks and query closure. The data sharing conditions should state access restrictions and permitted uses.