Better Code, Better Science

Improving scientific reproducibility using AI-assisted coding¶

By Russell A. Poldrack, Stanford University

Making science more reproducible and transparent is key to improving public trust in science. Because science is increasingly a computational enterprise, improving the quality of scientific research code is essential to making science more reproducible. Increasingly, this code is being written with the help of AI assistants, which can increase productivity but introduces the potential for errors. This book will provide a thorough guide to using AI-assisted coding techniques to generate scientific code that is readable and robust and that can provide reproducible answers to scientific questions.

The book is licensed according to the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 Generic (CC BY-NC 4.0) License. Please see the terms of that license for more details.

Table of Contents¶

• Better Code, Better Science
• Introduction
• Essential tools and techniques
• Principles of software engineering
• Software testing
• Coding with AI
• Project structure and management
• Data Organization and Management

Contributing to the book¶

This book is meant to be a living open-source document, with the source available online at https://github.com/poldrack/BetterCodeBetterScience. If you find any errors in the book or want to make a suggestion for how to improve it, please open an issue on the GitHub site. Even better, submit a pull request with your suggested changes!

See the Contributors’ Guide on GitHub for more details about contributing to the book.