DrWatson: the perfect sidekick for your scientific inquiries

Abstract

Doing scientific work always involves a lot of focus and scrutiny, since producing a scientific result requires several levels of depth of analysis, all of which must be as accurate and as reproducible as possible.All this required scrutiny should be naturally translated into the codebase of the scientific project.One should strive for a code that is doing what it is supposed to, is reproducible, doesn't break over time, is sufficiently clear of bugs, and with simulation results that are appropriately labelled, and more.The challenges associated with carrying out scientific work should not be made any worse by the difficulties of managing the codebase and resulting data/simulations.An unfortunate but likely outcome of this stress is that scientific codebases tend to be sloppy: folders are not organized, there is no version control, data are not provenanced properly, most scripts break over time, and the whole project is very hard, if not impossible, to reproduce.We have created the software DrWatson to make the process of scientific project management easier.In this paper we will describe how DrWatson results in an efficient scientific workflow, taking time away from project management and giving it to doing science.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 37 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.