Conclusions and outlookΒΆ

Perhaps you already follow all of the best practices mentioned in this document. If so, congratulations, and I’m sorry for wasting your time! Maybe you disagree with me about some of the suggestions. If so, please feel free to get in touch and we can discuss it (see below for contact details). Maybe you think some of the suggestions will be too much work, or take too much time. This is a fair point, and it is not easy to find the right balance between getting work done now and investing time in improving future productivity. In general, though, I think you will find that following good practices for data management and reproducible data analysis will pay off on a fairly short timescale: in a few weeks, at most a few months, you will reap the benefits of the time invested and be doing faster and better science. (Unfortunately there are no peer-reviewed, double-blind studies of the efficacy of most of these best practices; all I can say is that they work for me and for many others).

The sources for these notes are at https://bitbucket.org/apdavison/reproducible_research_cns/

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