Posted by Victoria Walkwe
Gentleman and Lang believe that the right method of conducting statistical analyses includes creating a compendium – a distributable project folder that contains all data, code, and documentation needed to reproduce the analysis. Dynamic documents, comprised of relevant data, analysis, and figures, reduce confusion and redundancy by allowing the work to be reproduced (by anyone). We have been using reproducible research methods in the homework; everything I do has to work for another person. While the individual assignments needed to be reproducible for a third-party (the grader), the group homework (at least for me) emphasized that in order to merge (or collaborate) other people need to be able to read/run your code. While I can’t see my research group using dynamic documents (we use MATLAB and LaTeX), we do document and explain all of our processing steps. We also make it a point to take the time and effort to thoroughly document our code.