2.5 R and computational reproducibility

One factor potentially contributing to R’s popularity, or at least a major bonus for using it, is ease of use for making analyses reproducible. All commands in R are typed out and the best way to do this is in a static script file from which you send commands to R to execute. This creates a record of your analyses. This feature is shared by other programs such as SAS and Stats, and other programming languages such as Matlab and Python. The advantage of R is that the script files are simply plain text files which anyone can open and - if they’ve downloaded R, which is free - they can run. Developers have also created numerous tools for creating reproducible analysis workflows and which allow R to be used in all data-related aspects of a project, from data cleaning to formatting journal submissions. What this means is that without become an expert programmer you can set up your work so that you can re-run all of your data cleaning, analyses, and graph building with a single command in R. This makes what you’ve done auditable, transparent, and easy to re-use for future work.