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Introduction

In the mid 1980's, we noticed that a few months after completing a project, the researchers at our laboratory were usually unable to reproduce their own computational work without considerable agony. In 1991, we solved this problem by developing a concept of electronic documents that makes scientific computations reproducible. Since then, electronic reproducible documents have become our principal means of technology transfer of scientific computational research. A small set of standard commands makes a document's results and their reproduction readily accessible to any reader. To implement reproducible computational research the author must use makefiles, adhere to a community's naming conventions, and reuse (include) the community's common building and cleaning rules. Since electronic reproducible documents are reservoirs of easily maintained, reusable software, not only the reader but also the author benefits from reproducible documents.


previous up next print clean
Next: REPRODUCIBLE RESEARCH Up: Schwab et al.: Making Previous: Schwab et al.: Making
Stanford Exploration Project
11/12/1997