Reproducible Publication with rrtools

A great overview of this approach to reproducible papers comes from:

Ben Marwick, Carl Boettiger & Lincoln Mullen (2018) Packaging Data Analytical Work Reproducibly Using R (and Friends), The American Statistician, 72:1, 80-88, doi:10.1080/00031305.2017.1375986

This lesson will draw from existing materials:

The key idea in Marwick et al. (2018) is that of the research compendium: A single container for not just the journal article associated with your research but also the underlying analysis, data, and even the required software environment required to reproduce your work. Research compendia make it easy for researchers to do their work but also for others to inspect or even reproduce the work because all necessary materials are readily at hand due to being kept in one place.

Rather than a constrained set of rules, the research compendium is a scaffold upon which to conduct reproducible research using open science tools such as:

Fortunately for us, Ben Marwick (and others) have written an R package called rrtools that helps us create a research compendium from scratch.

To start a reproducible paper with rrtools, run:

# Install the package
remotes::install_github("benmarwick/rrtools")

# Attach the library
library(rrtools)

# Create the compendium skeleton
use_compendium("mypaper")

You should see output similar to the below:

> rrtools::use_compendium("mypaper")
The directory mypaper has been created.
✓ Setting active project to '/Users/bryce/mypaper'
✓ Creating 'R/'
✓ Writing 'DESCRIPTION'
Package: mypaper
Title: What the Package Does (One Line, Title Case)
Version: 0.0.0.9000
Authors@R (parsed):
    * First Last <first.last@example.com> [aut, cre]
Description: What the package does (one paragraph).
License: MIT + file LICENSE
ByteCompile: true
Encoding: UTF-8
LazyData: true
Roxygen: list(markdown = TRUE)
RoxygenNote: 7.1.1
✓ Writing 'NAMESPACE'
✓ Writing 'mypaper.Rproj'
✓ Adding '.Rproj.user' to '.gitignore'
✓ Adding '^mypaper\\.Rproj$', '^\\.Rproj\\.user$' to '.Rbuildignore'
✓ Setting active project to '<no active project>'
✓ The package mypaper has been created
✓ Now opening the new compendium...
✓ Done. The working directory is currently /Users/bryce

Next, you need to:  ↓ ↓ ↓ 
● Edit the DESCRIPTION file
● Use other 'rrtools' functions to add components to the compendium

rrtools has created the beginnings of a research compendium for us. At this point, it looks mostly the same as an R package. That’s because it uses the same underlying folder structure and metadata and therefore it technically is an R package. And this means our research compendium will be easy to install, just like an R package.

Before we get to writing our reproducible paper, let’s fill in some more structure. Let’s:

  1. Add a license (always a good idea)
  2. Set up a README file in the RMarkdown format
  3. Create an analysis folder to hold our reproducible paper
usethis::use_apl2_license() # Change this
rrtools::use_readme_rmd()
rrtools::use_analysis()

At this point, we’re ready to start writing the paper. To follow the structure rrtools has put in place for us, here are some pointers:

It would also be a good idea to initialize this folder as a git repo for maximum reproducibility:

usethis::use_git()

After that, push a copy up to GitHub.

## create github repository and configure as git remote
usethis::use_github()

Hopefully, now that you’ve created a research compendium with rrtools, you can imagine how a pre-defined structure like the one rrtools creates might help you organize your reproducible research and also make it easier for others to understand your work.

For a more complete example than the one we built above, take a look at benmarwick/teaching-replication-in-archaeology.

Aknowledgement

The rrtools example had been ported from NCEAS Reproducible Research Techniques for Synthesis


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