Terminologies for Reproducible Research

Reproducible research—by its many names—has come to be regarded as a key concern across disciplines and stakeholder groups. Funding agencies and journals, professional societies and even mass media are paying attention, often focusing on the so-called “crisis” of reproducibility. One big problem keeps coming up among those seeking to tackle the issue: different groups are using terminologies in utter contradiction with each other. In July 2017, over a dozen participants joined the Workshop on Reproducibility Taxonomies for Computing and Computational Science at the National Science Foundation, to appraise the variety of terminologies. My presentation at that event (Barba, 2017) condensed a catalog of uses of the recurrent terms reproduce and replicate, often meaning different things but sometimes interchangeable.