The hard road to reproducibility

Science 07 Oct 2016 cover

Science 07 Oct 2016:
Vol. 354, Issue 6308, pp. 142
DOI: 10.1126/science.354.6308.142

Early in my Ph.D. studies, my supervisor assigned me the task of running computer code written by a previous student who was graduated and gone. It was hell. I had to sort through many different versions of the code, saved in folders with a mysterious numbering scheme. There was no documentation and scarcely an explanatory comment in the code itself. It took me at least a year to run the code reliably, and more to get results that reproduced those in my predecessor's thesis. Now that I run my own lab, I make sure that my students don't have to go through that.

Read the full-length piece in Science …

Related works

• "Reproducible and replicable CFD: it's harder than you think", Olivier Mesnard, Lorena A. Barba. IEEE/AIP Computing in Science and Engineering, 19(4):44–55 (August 2017). 10.1109/MCSE.2017.3151254 // Preprint arXiv:1605.04339 // Authorea manuscript // GitHub repo
  

  Accepted October 2016.

• "Reproducibility PI Manifesto", L. A. Barba. (13 December 2012). 10.6084/m9.figshare.104539
  

  Presentation for a talk given at the ICERM workshop “Reproducibility in Computational and Experimental Mathematics”. Published on figshare under CC-BY.

On Twitter

.@LorenaABarba's piece on reproducibility in scientific computing is a must read!

The hard road to reproducibility https://t.co/JF2eMhuFQV

— Paul Macklin (@MathCancer) November 3, 2016

Catching up on reading. This is a gem from @LorenaABarba published last month: The hard road to #reproducibility https://t.co/OD1bYlTAMB

— Carly Strasser (@carlystrasser) November 17, 2016

“The hard road to #reproducibility”—almost 80k views and 2,143 PDF downloads in little over two weeks. Nice. https://t.co/3Jys2wXhqg pic.twitter.com/NC6UPr241D

— Lorena Barba (@LorenaABarba) October 23, 2016