Pre-reading

Twenty minutes that will make Day 1 make sense

Reproducibility

  1. Peng RD. Reproducible research in computational science. Science 2011;334:1226–7. Introduces the reproducibility spectrum (from “publication only” to “full replication”).

  2. Baker M. 1,500 scientists lift the lid on reproducibility. Nature 2016;533:452–4. The survey where most researchers reported failing to reproduce someone else’s experiment, and more than half failed to reproduce their own.

Learning with data

  • Wickham H, Cetinkaya-Rundel M, Grolemund G R for Data Science. O’Reilly June 2025. The practical guide that teaches how to use R and the tidyverse to import, transform, visualize, and understand data.

  • Wickham H. Tidy data. Journal of Statistical Software 2014;59(10). The one-sentence version: each variable a column, each observation a row, each type of observational unit a table. Everything dplyr does on Day 1 afternoon assumes it.

Generative AI in research

A note on how to read all this

You are not expected to absorb it. Skim now, and come back after the workshop when the words have referents. The single most useful thing you can do before 9 September is finish the R primer: a concept you have typed once beats a concept you have read three times.

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