Posted by Kelsie Ferin
Gentleman and Lang begin by describing what reproducible research is. They describe it as “research papers with accompanying software tools that allow the reader to directly reproduce the results and employ the methods that are presented in the research paper”. The principles that are underlying reproducible research that they discuss in the paper are a compendium and dynamic documents. They describe a compendium to be something that combines text, data, and auxiliary software into a distributable and executable unit. In this paper, they say that a compendium must contain one or more dynamic document. Here, a dynamic document can be described as a document that can be transformed into a traditional, static document. We are currently using these methods in class. We refer to a compendium almost as a box or folder where we can store all of the essentials that are needed for a project or report. The dynamic document that we have been using with for this class is RMarkdown in RStudio. Here we are using the knit tool (knitr) which allows us to chunk our code within our RMarkdown post. This way, we are able to include the data, code, figures, and text all in one document so they are reproducible for other people. One main example where we are using tools like this are for our homework assignments. One way I can use these in the future are to put reports together for my research projects. That way I can send them to my advisor and collaborators and they will be able to see exactly what I am doing to the data and how I am getting the figures and analysis.