What is Reproducible Research?
Last updated on 2024-06-25 | Edit this page
For our workshop today….
For our workshop today, as the training was designed to be relevant to all disciplines, we are using the UKRN’s broad definition of reproducibility:
“Research that is sufficiently transparent that someone with the relevant expertise can clearly follow, as relevant for different types of research:
how it was done;
why it was done in that way;
the evidence that it established;
the reasoning and/or judgements that were used; and
how all of that led justifiably to the research findings and conclusions.”
In most discussions of reproducible research, especially in STEM disciplines, reproducible research is the concept that someone can, given your data and methods, redo your research and come to the same conclusion.
We expect that anyone conducting the same research should always come to the same conclusion. This enables us to trust that the knowledge derived from this research can be accepted as fact.
Replicability and Repeatability
There are a number of terms you may hear when we talk about reproducible. Replicable and Repeatable are two common terms that may arise.
The Turing Way offers the following descriptions:
Let’s look now on why this is important.
References
Reference: Definitions — The Turing Way Community. (2022). The Turing Way: A handbook for reproducible, ethical and collaborative research (Version 1.1.0) [Computer software]. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3233853 licenced as CC-BY
The Turing Way Community. This illustration is created by Scriberia with The Turing Way community, used under a CC-BY 4.0 licence. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3332807