Monthly Archives: March 2017

GitHub: Setting up a version control repository – Part 1

We have been tracking along nicely with the tutorials on using Git for version control. So far, the lessons have focused on version controlling documents on a local computer, but another groovy feature of Git is it allows you and your collaborators to version control documents using GitHub. What is GitHub? GitHub is a web-based version control repository and is

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Formalizing the definition of reproducibility and replicability

As highlighted in previous posts (e.g., 1, 2, 3), reproducibility and replicability are key features of scientific studies that have received considerable attention in the popular press and the scientific literature. However, as highlighted in a recent paper by Patil, Peng & Leek, there is no consensus on what these terms mean. Therefore, these authors took on the task of

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What does research reproducibility mean?

Concerns about research reproducibility (or lack thereof) continue to escalate but it seems people can have quite different ideas about what research reproducibility means. In a perspectives editorial, Goodman and colleagues demonstrate concepts on reproducibility can be both precise: …reproducibility refers to the ability of a researcher to duplicate the results of a prior study using the same materials as

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Software licenses demystified

Almost all scientists use computers on a daily basis. While some of the software they use will be proprietary, other software are conceived and developed by researchers themselves. In line with the current push for open and reproducible science, making scientific software available for inspection and use by other researchers is an important step in the research process. Furthermore, making

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File in/out: How to import CSV files into Python using Pandas

Comma separated values (CSV) files are a type of text file commonly used to store data. In a CSV file, each line of text contains values separated with commas. CSV files can be imported into Python in different ways (eg. csv.reader, numpy.loadtxt, etc). One useful method is to import CSV files into Pandas dataframes. Pandas package. Pandas is a Python

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