Communicating Results¶

People are busy, hence yo ushould breakdown results into different levels of detail

Research Paper¶

• Title
• Author list
• Abstract
• Body
• Results
• Supplementary Materials (details)
• Code/Data (more details)

Email¶

• Subject
• Summarize findings in one sentence
• Email body
• Brief description of problem
• Recall what was proposed
• Recall what was executed
• Summary findings in 1-2 paragraphs
• If you want to suggest future actions, make them concrete
• If you have questions for them to address, make them yes/no
• Attachments
• Literate Programming File
• Links to supplementary materials
• Code/Software/Data
• Github Repo/Project Website

RPubs¶

Free site to publish work

Reproducible Research Checklist¶

✅ Start with good science

• Garbage in, Garbage out
• Coherent, focused question
• working with good collaborators
• Something that’s interesting to you

❌ Don’t use GUI softwares for analysis, as it is hard to reproduce

❌ Don’t do things by hand

• Using spreadsheets to perform operations
• Editing tables/figures manually

✅ Document unavoidable manual operations (not as easy at is it sounds)

• Downloading data from a website
• Moving data to outside project folder
• Splitting/reformatting data files

✅ Teach a computer to do tasks

• Downloading data

download.file("somelink/file.csv", "local_location/file.csv")

• Web scraping

✅ Use version control (such as Git)

• Helps slow down and perform tasks step by step
• Add changes in small chunks

✅ Keep track of software environment

• Write cross-platform code
• For eg, in python be careful when working with paths. Use os.path.join(folder, file) instead of folder + "/" + file
• Computer Architecture
• CPU, GPU specs
• Operating System
• Software toolchain
• Compilers/Interpreter
• Programming languages
• Command shell
• Database backends
• Data analysis softwares
• Supporting software
• Libraries
• Packages
• Dependencies
• External dependencies
• Websites
• Data/Software repositories
• Remote databases
• Version Numbers

❌ Don’t save output independent of code

✅ Set your seed for random number generator

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