Week 13: Scientific communication: inspectable, reproducible, interpretable
What would another reader need in order to check your result?
Design stage: Scientific communication. Make the pipeline inspectable, reproducible, and interpretable for someone outside your field, and review its ethics.
Prepare for class
Read: Chapter 9; communicating research. The chapters are in Canvas, and the companion page has the materials that go with them.
Reading focus: Follow the three properties in turn: an inspectable pipeline, reproducible results, and interpretable findings. Note the four-category framework for reproducibility and Kirk’s four-stage design process.
Write a half-page Practice note on one study from the scientific-communication list. Discussion leaders prepare the opening. Submit Milestone 4 before Wednesday’s class.
Weekly time budget
Outside class: 360 minutes (6 clock hours) maximum planned work per student. These allocations include all required preparation and submissions; they are planning estimates, not time logs for grading.
| Work | Planned minutes |
|---|---|
| Reading and discussion preparation | 90 |
| Exercises and project work, including troubleshooting | 150 |
| Writing, documentation, and reflection | 120 |
| Total | 360 |
Assemble Milestone 4 after the review. Read Chapter 9 for the Practice discussion, and pin the environment your analysis runs in.
How the weekly cap works. If required work will exceed the budget, save your attempt and contact the instructor to adjust scope or arrange support.
From the book
Chapter 9’s Practice section audits a published study for the three properties. Exercise 10.1.2 then starts applying them to your own work by freezing the environment your analysis runs in.
- Exercise 10.1.2: Freeze your computational environment. Required.
- Exercise 10.1.1: Adapted preregistration for an exploratory CSS analysis. Optional.
The book gives each exercise’s steps. What to submit, and when.
On the companion website: Chapter 9 studies, filtered to scientific communication · Chapter 10 materials · Communication tools
Monday, April 5: Practice discussion: scientific communication in empirical studies
12:45–2:00 PM · PV A203
After the student-led opening, start from one result in the study and ask whether you can trace it to the data, code, and decisions that produced it. Place the study in the four-category reproducibility framework, and read one of its figures through Kirk’s design process.
Check the reasoning: If something is unavailable, name the check you cannot perform because of it. A clear figure cannot repair a claim the shared materials do not let you test.
Wednesday, April 7: Reproducibility workshop
12:45–2:00 PM · PV A203
Do Exercise 10.1.2 on the analysis from Milestone 4: record the installed packages, pin exact versions, seed every stochastic step, and save the data snapshot the analysis reads. Run it under at least three seeds and report the spread. Place your work on Gundersen’s R1 to R4 scale.
Check the reasoning: A requirements file records packages. It is not a complete environment, so keep the language version and operating system with it. Name the smallest change that would move you up one reproducibility type.
Work to carry forward
Commit the pinned environment and the seeded script. Choose the audience for your artifact and the three or four questions they would ask.
Due this week, at the start of Wednesday’s class:
- Milestone 4: Data analysis (15 points)
Due at the start of P539’s assigned final session:
- Milestone 5: Scientific communication (15 points)
- Milestone 6: Final presentation (10 points)
- Final reflection: the whole pipeline (10 points)
Assignments and deliverables · Your project · The book and companion website