Chapter 4 Reproducible Workflows

4.1 Why should you learn this?

Let’s start with the big stuff. Why should you be here? Why should you care?

I remember leaving the lab that day in frustration, knowing that I would have to rewrite all those pages. I vowed to find a better way to do things, and that way for me has been RStudio. Its not perfect, but its the closest thing I have found.

This book will bring you through several tasks that an everyday scientist has to accomplish and demonstrates them using YouTube videos and examples.

Add figures and content from the Data Battles presentations

4.2 What is reproducible science?

I am guilty of this in my older projects. Have you ever looked back on data you ran several years ago only to realize you have no idea what data was used to create certain figures or tables? Traditional project pipelines usually involve some combination of

  1. Data processing in MATLAB
  2. Statistics in SPSS, SAS, GraphPad etc
  3. Writing the document in Microsoft Word

The issue with this pipeline is shown below. Where we go through a very plausible situation where your supervisor asks for changes to be made in your data.

Add figures with Jeff/ Academic pipeline from the Data Battles presentations