Figure 2.

The quality assurance and quality control (QA&QC) framework, which follows the data lifecycle (inner circle) with explicit quality assurance and quality control incorporated at each stage. Quality assurance (middle circle) is a continuous process, with explicit steps at each stage of the data lifecycle. Quality control (outer half circle) processes begin after data are collected. For simplicity we have only identified five lifecycle stages. However, this framework can easily be expanded or contracted to accommodate a different number of lifecycle stages (e.g., figure 1; Michener et al. 2012).