Best Practices for Scientific Computing

Scientific computation is nowadays an integral part of most research in many science fields. But the majority of researchers never had any formal training on how to structure, maintain, and collaborate on such projects. I had to learn the hard way, and there are several resources nowadays that I wished I had access to when I was starting.

A good start is to read Good enough practices in scientific computing paper, and Best Practices for Scientific Computing. They provide apt recommendations from data management, collaboration, project organisation, revision control systems to the writing of manuscripts.

I also recommend The Plain Person’s Guide to Plain Text Social Science by Kieran Healy.

If you do scientific computation as part of your work, do yourself a favour and read those papers.