REDCap Best Practices

• Before Creating a Project, be sure to identify all aspects of the project including goals, data collection instruments and protocols, and general project management.
• Use categorical field types (yes/no, multiple choice, etc.) whenever possible.
• Per University’s policies, all fields capturing Personally Identifying Information (PII) must be marked as identifiers. The “Check for Identifiers” link on the Project Setup page makes it easy to mark fields as identifiers.
• Multiple Choice Questions: Do not re-number choices in production mode because it can lead to data corruption. Use “99” for choice like “NA” in case more choices will be added so it does not interfere with the previous choices and their coding:
  • 1, Blue
  • 2, White
  • 3, Green
  • 99, Other
• Utilize the snapshot function to store revision history before making significant changes to the instrument.
• Thoroughly test the project before moving it to Production mode because changes in Production mode will need to be approved by an administrator. Use practice data in Development mode to test the project; the test data can be removed when pushing the project to Production mode.
• If using the Randomization feature, utilize a statistician early in the process to maintain randomization and accuracy.