Facilitating Replication and Reproducibility in Team Science: the 'projects' R Package

Abstract

The contemporary scientific community places a growing emphasis on the reproducibility of research. The projects R package is a free, open-source endeavor created in the interest of facilitating reproducible research workflows. It adds to existing software tools for reproducible research and introduces several practical features that are helpful for scientists and their collaborative research teams. For each individual project, it supplies an intuitive framework for storing raw and cleaned study data sets, and provides script templates for protocol creation, data cleaning, data analysis and manuscript development. Internal databases of project and author information are generated and displayed, and manuscript title pages containing author lists and their affiliations are automatically generated from the internal database. File management tools allow teams to organize multiple projects. When used on a shared file system, multiple researchers can harmoniously contribute to the same project in a less punctuated manner, reducing the frequency of misunderstandings and the need for status updates.