We think this is an interesting paper for anyone who wants to learn to build an API with the R package plumber. This is a novel method in health economics, but we believe will help improve the transparency of modelling methods in our field.
Most electron beam physics is considered in the context of a vacuum, but there are applications to long-range electron beam transmission in air. As particle acceleration sources become more compact, we may have the chance to take particle beams out to the real world. The example provided in the paper describes that of x-ray backscatter detectors, where significantly stronger signals could be achieved by scanning objects with electron beams. This paper forms the basis for a potential new mode of particle-beam research, and it is important to ensure the reproducibility of this work for groups who wish to explore the applications of this new technology.
In theory, reproducing this paper should only require a clone of a public Git repository, and the execution of a Makefile (detailed in the README of the paper repository at https://github.com/psychoinformatics-de/paper-remodnav). We've set up our paper to be dynamically generated, retrieving and installing the relevant data and software automatically, and we've even created a tutorial about it, so that others can reuse the same setup for their work. Nevertheless, we've for example never tried it out across different operating systems - who knows whether it works on Windows? We'd love to share the tips and tricks we found to work, and even more love feedback on how to improve this further.
Even though the approach in the paper focuses on a specific measurement (clumped isotopes) and how to optimize which and how many standards we use, I hope that the problem is general enough that insight can translate to any kind of measurement that relies on machine calibration. I've committed to writing a literate program (plain text interspersed with code chunks) to explain what is going on and to make the simulations one step at a time. I really hope that this is understandable to future collaborators and scientists in my field, but I have not had any code review internally and I also didn't receive any feedback on it from the reviewers. I would love to see if what in my mind represents "reproducible code" is actually reproducible, and to learn what I can improve for future projects!
If all went right, the analysis should be fully reproducible without the need to make any adjustments. The paper aims to find optimal locations for new parkruns, but we were not 100% sure how 'optimal' should be defined. We provide a few examples, but the code was meant to be flexible enough to allow potential decision makers to specify their own, alternative objectives. The spatial data set is also quite interesting and fun to play around with. Cave: The full analysis takes a while to run (~30+ min) and might require >= 8gb ram.
The focus of the project is reproducibility. Here we show the differences to access data compared to similar initiatives: https://ropensci.org/blog/2019/05/09/tradestatistics/. Also, similar projects have obscure parts, while our exposes the code from raw data downloading to dashboard creation.