Conducting research reproducibly enables researchers to re-use earlier materials (e.g., analysis code, file organization systems) to execute these common research tasks more efficiently in subsequent iterations.įourth, conducting reproducible research is a strong indicator to fellow researchers of rigor, trustworthiness, and transparency in scientific research. Science is an iterative process, and many of the same tasks are performed over and over. Third, reproducible research enables quick reconfiguration of previously conducted research tasks so that new projects that require similar tasks become much simpler and easier.
#SECTION 1801 ET SE OF THE PUBLIC UTILITIES CODE CODE#
When analyses are reproducible, creating a new figure may be as easy as changing one value in a line of code and re-running a script, rather than spending hours recreating a figure from scratch. This is often requested by supervisors, collaborators, and reviewers across all stages of a research project, and expediting this process saves substantial amounts of time. Second, reproducible research enables researchers to quickly and simply modify analyses and figures. This enables easier explanation of work to collaborators, supervisors, and reviewers, and it allows collaborators to conduct supplementary analyses more quickly and more efficiently. Because of this, researchers who conduct reproducible research are the primary beneficiaries of this practice.įirst, reproducible research helps researchers remember how and why they performed specific analyses during the course of a project. Reproducible research is a by-product of careful attention to detail throughout the research process and allows researchers to ensure that they can repeat the same analysis multiple times with the same results, at any point in that process. Why do reproducible research? Reproducible research benefits those who do it These principles are applicable to researchers working in all sub-disciplines within ecology and evolutionary biology with data sets of all sizes and levels of complexity. In it, we make the case for why all research should be reproducible, explain why research is often not reproducible, and present a simple three-part framework all researchers can use to make their research more reproducible. This commentary describes basic requirements for such reproducible research in the fields of ecology and evolutionary biology. Replicating studies remains the gold standard for rigorous scientific research, but reproducibility is increasingly viewed as a minimum standard that all scientists should strive toward (Peng 2011, Sandve et al. This approach focuses on the research process after data collection is complete, and it has many (though not all) of the advantages of replicating studies with independent data while minimizing the largest barrier (i.e., the financial and time costs of collecting new data). Research is reproducible when others can reproduce the results of a scientific study given only the original data, code, and documentation (Essawy et al. 2013).īecause replicating studies with new independent data is expensive, rarely published in high-impact journals, and sometimes even methodologically impossible, computationally reproducible research (most often termed simply “reproducible research”) is often suggested as a pathway for increasing our ability to assess the validity and rigor of scientific results (Peng 2011). Because of this, researchers are working to develop new ways for researchers, research institutions, research funders, and journals to overcome this problem (Peng 2011, Fiedler et al. 2007, Hewitt 2012, Bohannon 2015, Open Science Collaboration 2015), and rates of paper retractions are increasing (Cokol et al. 2020), many attempted replications of well-known scientific studies have failed in a wide variety of disciplines (Moonesinghe et al. Scientific papers often include inadequate detail to enable replication (Haddaway and Verhoeven 2015, Archmiller et al. This has been termed the “replication crisis” (Ioannidis 2005, Schooler 2014). Replication is a fundamental tenet of science, but there is increasing fear among scientists that too few scientific studies can be replicated.