The current issue of Computing in Science and Engineering (CiSE) is a special issue on reproducible research, edited by two pioneers in the field: Jon Claerbout and Sergey Fomel. They have assembled a great set of articles from experts with a lot of first-hand, personal reproducible research experience, so I would highly recommend this to my colleague researchers!
Monthly Archive for January, 2009
I got a pointer earlier this week to a New York Times article about R. A very interesting article about the use of R in scientific communities and industrial research, mainly for statistical analysis. R is open source software, so it is free and has already taken advantage from contributions made by various authors. And (although I haven’t used it myself yet), it is a great tool for reproducible research. Using the package Sweave, authors can write a single document containing their article and the R code to reproduce the results and put them in place. This ensures that all the material is in a single place.
It also shows something about the amazing power of open source software developed by a community of authors (and typically users at the same time).
I seem to be dwelling quite some time on the web lately… After my post about the lifetime of URLs, here’s one about domain names and reproducibility. I recently noticed when looking around that there are quite some websites and domain names related to reproducible research.
reproducibleresearch.org is an overview website by John D. Cook containing links to reproducible research projects, articles about the topics, and relevant tools. It also contains a blog about reproducible ideas.
reproducibleresearch.com is owned by the people at Blue Reference, who created Inference for Office, a commercial tool to perform reproducible research from within Microsoft Office.
reproducibility.org is used by Sergey Fomel and his colleagues as home for their Madagascar open source package for reproducible research experiments.
reproducible.org is a reproducible research archive maintained by R. Peng at Johns Hopkins School, where the goal is to host a place for reproducible research packages.
Quite a range of domain names containing the word “reproducible” (or a derivative), if you ask me! And then I didn’t even start about the Open Research or Research 2.0 sites. Let’s hope this also means that research itself will soon see a big boost in reproducibility!
Let me in my turn wish you all the best for 2009! I wish you a beautiful, entirely non-reproducible year with lots of great experiences!
2008 was the year in which this site got started, and to be honest, I am quite happy with the frequency at which I managed to post articles here. In its first year, the site also obtained a reasonably good visibility on Google, so nothing to complain about. It does remain to a large extent a one-way communication, but as I hear from colleague bloggers, that is not uncommon. Let me at the start of this year invite you again: if you read this blog, and like or dislike something I write, please post a comment! It will encourage me to continue writing, and make me feel a bit less lost in blogosphere.
And up to a wonderful 2009 now!