Reproducibility with R applied to the study of Palaeolithic distribution sites

S4: Poster session | Poster
  • Mikel Díaz-Rodríguez
    Universidade de Santiago de Compostela & Aarhus University

In recent years there has been an increase in archaeological studies based on Open Science. It is increasingly common for archaeologists to publish the code and data used in their academic work and this allows any researcher, with basic knowledge, to use this information, apply it to their own studies or adapt it to their problems. However, for the information used and generated from an archaeological investigation to be accessible to most researchers, it must have a series of basic criteria that make it understandable to any researcher. Therefore, there is still much to be done in terms of establishing these basic guidelines in reproducible research with R. In recent years, attempts have been made to establish protocols and perhaps the best way to face this challenge is by presenting some papers and discussing the results of the use of reproducible research with R. That is why this presentation shows various studies in which the code used in R has been published with the aim that the analyses used can be replicated for the analysis of the occupation of Palaeolithic sites in NW Iberia. In these case studies, it has been deemed convenient to use repositories such as Github and Zenodo, which are accessible to anyone. However, the problem is that not everyone is able to understand the code and what can be done with each of the lines of that code. That is why Markdown has also been used in these studies, which allows the user to be guided through the different steps with the aim of carrying out the analysis of the work in question. With the presentation of these studies, it is intended to publicize the experience with reproducible research with R and Markdown and to be able to shed some light on the possible problems that are generated when sharing data and code with researchers and that these may be able to understand and reproduce the proposed analyses.