Thou Shalt Be Reproducible! A Technology Perspective

Front Psychol. 2016 Jul 14:7:1079. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01079. eCollection 2016.

Abstract

This article elaborates on reproducibility in psychology from a technological viewpoint. Modern open source computational environments are shown and explained that foster reproducibility throughout the whole research life cycle, and to which emerging psychology researchers should be sensitized, are shown and explained. First, data archiving platforms that make datasets publicly available are presented. Second, R is advocated as the data-analytic lingua franca in psychology for achieving reproducible statistical analysis. Third, dynamic report generation environments for writing reproducible manuscripts that integrate text, data analysis, and statistical outputs such as figures and tables in a single document are described. Supplementary materials are provided in order to get the reader started with these technologies.

Keywords: LATEX; R; R Markdown; data archiving; knitr; open source; reproducibility.