Reproducible Research Learn Room

Build Your Reproducible Research Compendium

To create a reproducible research compendium, you should provide all components of the research that are necessary for others to understand and reproduce the research. The components of a full Reproducible Research Compendium are listed below:

Once these items are ready, simply regroup them in one archive file (ex. ZIP, GZIP formats) and you are almost done!

Now that your reproducible research compendium is ready, click here to learn how you can best share it with other researchers. You can also browse around our Librum to find good examples of reproducible research compendia.

Enhance Your Reproducible Research Compendium

Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do Professor Donald E. Knuth     Stanford University Read Literate Programming

Many different methods are proposed each day by researchers to enhance a reproducible research compendium and to make it easier for others to adapt and extend the reported research. In this spirit, Literate Programming techniques can be greatly used in the enhancement of a reproducible research compendium.

Literate programming, first proposed by Professor Donald E. Knuth at Stanford University, refers to the combination of the text and code within the same document in a manner that is human readable.

Many interesting literate programming tools exist that allow us to mix a narrative description of the analysis together with the appropriate code segments and generate strong dynamic and interactive documents.

Some efforts have been made to create new software packages upon literate programming tools with a focus on reproducibility. A list of such software packages is presented below.

However, these RR adapted software packages are usually developed through the efforts of a small team or dedicated researchers in specialized areas, and there are no widely accepted platforms to create dynamic and interactive reproducible research documents.

Therefore, we think there is an emerging need to develop new software packages, that adopt the ideas of literate programming in reproducible research, in order to generate dynamic, and interactive reproducible research compendia.

In the next page, we tell about sharing a reproducible research compendium and related issues.

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