Reproducible Research in Computational Harmonic Analysis

Scientific computation is emerging as absolutely central to the scientific method. Unfortunately, it's error-prone and currently immature—traditional scientific publication is incapable of finding and rooting out errors in scientific computation—which must be recognized as a crisis. An important recent development and a necessary response to the crisis is reproducible computational research in which researchers publish the article along with the full computational environment that produces the results. The authors have practiced reproducible computational research for 15 years and have integrated it with their scientific research and with doctoral and postdoctoral education. In this article, they review their approach and how it has evolved over time, discussing the arguments for and against working reproducibly.