News

Three ways to connect with other UK LLC users 

Abigail Hill

1st Jul 2025

“The combined results of several people working together is often much more effective than could be that of an individual scientist working alone.” – John Bardeen

In the words of two-time Nobel Prize recipient, John Bardeen, collaborating with other researchers can most definitely lead to more effective research. And while data linkage can often be complex, we are dedicated to making it easy for our research users to connect. 

At the heart of our organisation lies a strong commitment to delivering great user experiences. We understand that researchers’ needs may be different, so we are committed to providing a variety of tools and resources to support and enhance our user research journey. Part of this process is the ability to connect and share insights with others, both within the same project or externally to other researchers studying in similar fields. 

 
In this post, Abigail will explore 3 key resources we provide to support users connecting with each other. 

1. Sharing contact details and chatting with other users 

We run a monthly user group which all our active users get an invite to. The agenda is packed with updates, interesting lightning talks and some fun ice breakers too. One of the benefits of the user group is getting together in a ‘virtual’ room with a group of other researchers who are in the same position, getting stuck into some interesting research! All our meetings have a collaborative element, and we use the rather snazzy collaborating tool ‘Miro’. On our user group Miro board, we have a place where users can put their contact details and subject area so they can contact each other to talk further. 

2. Sharing thoughts through our forum 

We run a forum which is hosted by Google Groups. Active users are invited to join the group when they are set up on a project. The forum is a great place to connect with other users and post questions and answers relating to topics such as: coding issues, dataset queries and code lists. If you get really stuck with a question, our data team are on hand to reply to questions on the forum as well. As the famous Sociologist, C. Wright Mills’ alludes to, one’s personal challenges can often be attributed to larger shared issues. That being said, if you are facing a research challenge, the odds are someone has previously faced the challenge, or future researchers may also face the same problem. Therefore, we largely encourage helping your fellow users out by sharing from your learnt experiences. 

3. Sharing code on GitHub and GitLab 

All our users are set up with a project folder on our GitHub and a GitLab account which you can login within the Trusted Research Environment (TRE). When you start it is a good idea to look at the Data Use Register to find projects using the same datasets or similar research areas. Then you can take a look in the individual project folders on our GitHub to see if the users on the project have any code that may be useful to your own research. We support external code being put in the TRE, barring disclosure checks.  

Once set up in the TRE, you can also use GitLab to share code with others on the same project. GitLab enables you to share version-controlled code with your fellow project research team members. There is also a shared area of GitLab where code from others can be accessed if they have made it available. 

Some current examples of useful code from other users include preparing cancer registry data, comparing cohort-reported and hospital-reported address data and calculating comorbidity scores. 

For more information on how to optimise your use of GitHub and GitLab with a UK LLC project, take a look at the ‘Using Git’ pages on Guidebook.