Use Case: Link Papers to Script and Model Runs

[mbjones]

Use Case: Link Papers to Script Runs and scripts

• Contributors: Matt Jones (@mbjones), Chris Jones (@csjx)

Goal and Summary

A scientist can provide citation links to scholarly papers that were derived from particular executions of a script or model. These links can take the form of links to published identifiers for the execution trace, or from the trace to the paper via e.g., a DOI. As a scientist using e.g., R or Matlab, The goal is to link a paper to a given script run to document the exact process used to derive published data, figures, or tables. In R or Matlab, after executing a script and recording provenance information about the run, a researcher can later update the execution's provenance information by providing a link to a permanent identifier (such as a DOI) of a published document. Other researchers can discover the papers from links of the script executions.

Why is it important and to whom?

• It is critical to computational reproducibility
• It improves discovery via finding all papers related to particular analyses

Why hasn’t it been solved yet?

• Repositories for execution traces are rare, and those that exist are not well established
• Tools for generating execution traces are not widely adopted
• Standards for representing traces have been in flux (e.g., OPM, PROV, etc)

Additional Information and Links

• DataONE Use Case 42A: Link Papers to Script Runs