ABSTRACT
Researchers often start thinking about making their work reproducible near the end of the research process when they write up their results or maybe even later when a journal requires their data and code be made available for publication. Or maybe even later when another researcher asks if they can use the data from a published article to reproduce the findings. By then there may be numerous versions of the data set and records of the analyses stored across multiple folders on the researcher’s computers. It can be dicult and time consuming to sift through these files to create an accurate account of how the results were reached. Waiting until near the end of the research process to start thinking about reproducibility can lead to incomplete documentation that does not give an accurate account of how findings were made. Focusing on reproducibility from the beginning of the process and continuing to follow a few simple guidelines throughout your research can help you avoid these problems. Remember “reproducibility is not an afterthought-it is something that must be built into the project from the beginning” (Donohue, 2010, 386).
