Alberto Pepe removed 'if you get more ambitious' per reviewer 2 request  over 10 years ago

Commit id: 5879584082f6b983c5cd23c26eb12db4feeb9480

deletions | additions      

       

# Rule 4. Publish workflow as context.  Traditionally, what computer and information scientists call "workflow" has been captured in what scientists call the "methods" and/or "analysis" section(s) of a scholarly article, where data collection, manipulation, and analysis processes are described. Today, many scientific studies use computer software to carry out the bulk of its workflow, but rarely is the end-to-end process described in a paper or a single software package. Thus, while directly publishing code is critical (see Rule 6), publishing a description of your processing steps offers essential context for interpreting and re-using data. In the future, we envision that the most useful workflow documentation will be part of an electronic provenance record that links together all the pieces that led to a result: the data citation (Rule 2), the pointer to the code (Rule 6), the workflow (this Rule), and a scholarly paper (Rule 5). But for the time being, you what  can use a system that documents scientific workflows (see Appendix for a list). you do now?  At a minimum, provide a simple sketch of data flow across software, indicating how intermediate and final data products and results are generated. If you get more ambitious, generated, or  consider providing an online service that thoroughly  encapsulates the workflow. workflow (see Appendix for a list of services).  Keep in mind that even if the data used are not "new," in that they come from a well-documented archive, it is still important to document the archive query that produced the data you used, along with all the operations you performed on the data after they were retrieved. Keeping better track of workflow, as context, will likely benefit you and your collaborators enough to justify the loftier, more altruistic, goals espoused here.