In the autumn of 2019 Louise and Andrew spent some time mulling over how to distil some of the positive things happening in their areas of work around reproducibility into an event. Planning led to a knowledge exchange day which they hoped would contribute to building common standards for reproducibility with survey and administrative data.
Experts in the field, from data owners, producers, statistical laos rcs data regulators, statistical data users, peer and data reviewers to data curators and managers of Trusted Research Environments (TREs) came together to discuss and debate a range of issues around research based on statistical data; published and unpublished.
And, what a better way than to spend Valentine’s day with lovers… of code, and the challenge of reproducibility in research!
heart shape within representation of data
Image: heart shape within representation of data (Photo by Alexander Sinn on Unsplash)
What is reproducibility?
Before we start, its useful to clarify what ‘Reproducibility’ is and how it differs from ‘Replication’.
A replication study is generally seen as one that is conducted from the collection of new data or undertaking new experiments, which can be implemented eventually with other methods.
Reproducibility – of a published research article – is where the authors have provided all the data, code, and processing instructions necessary to rerun exactly the same analysis and obtain identical results.
Reproducibility requires a will to work openly and share.