Wrap-up

Last updated on 2025-04-15 | Edit this page

Overview

Questions

  • What reproducible research practices have we covered in this course?
  • What tools and practices should you learn next?

Objectives

  • Reflect on the reproducible research practices in this course and identify next steps for additional skills

In this course we have explored the significance of reproducible research and explored some tools and practices we can use in our own R development that can help us and others do better research including unit testing and dependency management.

Reproducible research often requires that researchers implement new practices and learn new tools - in this course we taught you some of these as a starting point but you will discover what works best for yourself, your group, community and domain.

Some of these practices may take a while to implement and may require perseverance, others you can start practicing today.

An image of a Chinese proverb "The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now
An image of a Chinese proverb “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now” by CCNULL, used under a CC-BY 2.0 licence

Next Steps 1

In this course we focused on tools and practices relevant to R development.

A key practice / tool that we did not cover in this course is the use of version control tools to track changes in you project. Some of the tools covered in this course e.g. the rrtools compendium will work even better when used with version control tools.

This is an extremely important skill that can help support reproducible research - but that’s a story for another course.

Further reading

Please check out the following resources for some additional reading on the topic of this course and the full reference set.

Key Points

  • We covered a range of best practices for reproducible research in this course
  • Thes practices will deliver even better results if you pair them with the use of version control e.g. git/GitHub.

Attribution

This episode reuses material from the “Wrap-up” episode of the Software Carpentries Incubator course “Tools and practices of FAIR research software” under a CC-BY-4.0 with modifications: Objectives, Questions, Key Points and Further Reading sections have been updated to reflect the remixed R focussed content.

  1. Original Content↩︎