Creating a REDCap project begins with project setup. The setup process usually requires a project title, project purpose, project type, notes, and sometimes institutional metadata such as principal investigator, department, or IRB reference. The project title should be clear and specific enough to distinguish it from training or test projects. A title such as “Pediatric Fever Follow-up Cohort 2026” is more useful than “Malaria Study” because it communicates population, subject, and timeframe.
After project creation, the Online Designer is one of the main tools used to build instruments. The Online Designer provides a graphical interface for creating forms, adding fields, changing field order, defining field labels, selecting field types, configuring validation rules, adding branching logic, and setting survey options. It is especially useful for smaller projects, rapid prototyping, and training. Users can immediately see the structure of instruments and adjust forms without editing the entire data dictionary file.
The project setup phase should not be rushed. Before building forms, the data manager should have a protocol, CRF draft, data collection matrix, variable naming convention, and initial data dictionary. If the project is built informally by adding fields as ideas arise, the database may quickly become inconsistent. Instruments may overlap, variables may be named poorly, and validation rules may be forgotten. Good setup begins outside REDCap with design thinking, then uses REDCap to implement the design.
REDCap also offers a Data Dictionary upload process, which allows users to build or revise a project using a spreadsheet. This method is powerful for larger studies because it supports bulk editing, version control, peer review, and efficient reuse of standardized variables. Many experienced data managers prefer to build initial instruments in a spreadsheet and then upload them to REDCap, especially when a study contains many variables or when review by statisticians and investigators is required.
Whether using Online Designer or Data Dictionary upload, the data manager should maintain documentation outside the system. A REDCap project can store field settings, but a study still needs a record of design decisions, version history, protocol mapping, testing notes, and approval. This documentation is part of the data management record and supports future analysis, audits, and archival.