Git: A powerful tool to facilitate greater reproducibility and transparency in science.

Author(s): Karthik Ram
Target Journal: Source Code in Medicine and Biology

Git is a powerful version control system that is widely used in software development. The features of Git that make it popular among software developers also makes it ideal for managing research workflows. In this article I describe how the power of Git could be leveraged in a scientific context to improve reproduciblity, increase transparency, and make it easy for others to build upon existing work. I also provide a handful of real-world use cases describing how Git and Git hosting services such as GitHub can enhance collaborative efforts, lower barriers to data re-use, and accelerate development of new ideas.

This manuscript is currently an early draft. Comments and suggestions are quite welcome either as issues or via email.

• raw manuscript source in markdown (figure captions and citations not rendered in this version)
• Draft PDF (contains parsed citations and figure captions)
• Bibliography

Compiling the manuscript

I'm using Pandoc as the document generator. Once installed, run:

pandoc -H margins.sty --bibliography Git_ms.bib --csl plos.csl Git_manuscript.md -o Git_manuscript.pdf

Citing this paper

This article was published in Source Code in Medicine and Biology

Ram, K 2013. Git can facilitate greater reproducibility and increased transparency in science. Source Code for Biology and Medicine 2013 8:7.

Final published pdf