Reproducible electronic documents

Matt Schwab and Jon Claerbout

We give you our system for filing scientific computational research: Reproducible electronic documents. These documents enable you - or anyone with access to your files - to handily regenerate your results. Thus your research and your software can be shared and reused. Reproducible electronic documents rely on UNIX makefiles, a few file naming conventions, and a small set of make rules and definitions. Two pages of motivation and summary.

Universal rules for reproducible documents

SEP-specific rules for reproducible documents

If you are not affiliated with SEP you probably want to get the generic rules mentioned above.

Archived reproducible electronic documents

Following reproducible documents have been equipped with GNU make rules: Schwab tested all of these documents and the reproducibility rules by removing and rebuilding all the documents' figures (276) on three different computers, IBM, HP, and SUN.

Since 1992 SEP produced reproducible documents using the make dialect cake:

A former cake version

In 1995 we abandoned cake and converted to GNU make. Cake had served us well for many years. Since older SEP documents are based on cake, we offer here our former rules and the cake source code.

Related pointers and topics

Reproducible research elsewhere

If you create reproducible, electronic research documents, please let us know and we will point to your web page.
matt@sep.stanford.edu