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.
In the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, this paper provided important evidence regarding the effect of misinformation on vaccination intent. Its analyses and conclusions were extremely important for decision makers. Therefore, it is also important that the analyses are reproducible.
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!
The paper describes pyKNEEr, a python package for open and reproducible research on femoral knee cartilage using Jupyter notebooks as a user interface. I created this paper with the specific intent to make both the workflows it describes and the paper itself open and reproducible, following guidelines from authorities in the field. Therefore, two things in the paper can be reproduced: 1) workflow results: Table 2 contains links to all the Jupyter notebooks used to calculate the results. Computations are long and might require a server, so if you want to run them locally, I recommend using only 2 or 3 images as inputs for the computations. Also, the paper should be sufficient, but if you need further introductory info, there are a documentation website: https://sbonaretti.github.io/pyKNEEr/ and a "how to" video: https://youtu.be/7WPf5KFtYi8 2) paper graphs: In the captions of figures 1, 4, and 5 you can find links to data repository, code (a Jupyter notebook), and the computational environment (binder) to fully reproduce the graph. These computations can be easily run locally and require a few seconds. All Jupyter notebooks automatically download data from Zenodo and provide dependencies, which should make reproducibility easier.
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.
This was my third attempt at making a paper fully reproducible. To date I it's the most reproducible that I have published. I'm interested to know what stumbling blocks exist that I'm not aware of (aside from needing software like ArcGIS to fully rerun the complete analysis).
