In public health, “reproducible research” is often introduced with crisis statistics and lab metaphors. Those debates matter. In the work I do, the more urgent version is plainer:
Can another analyst on the team re-run the quality checks and the core tables next month without calling me?
If the answer is no, the study is already at risk — especially when data are still streaming from the field.
What reproducibility means on a field study
For household diaries, multi-country evaluations, or clinical chart abstraction, I treat reproducibility as four concrete things:
- Raw is sacred — immutable extracts or locked REDCap exports with dates and versions
- Cleaning is code — R or Stata scripts with named rules, not a one-off Excel “final_v7”
- HFC is scheduled — high-frequency checks run on a rhythm, with logs of what failed
- Outputs are rebuildable — Quarto/R Markdown (or equivalent) can regenerate tables and briefs
That is closer to research data management than to a philosophy seminar.
Where studies actually break
| Failure mode | What I have seen | Mitigation |
|---|---|---|
| Analyst turnover | Only one person knows the “real” cleaning steps | Documented scripts + handoff notes |
| Wave panic | QC postponed until closeout | Daily/weekly HFC while field is live |
| Silent schema drift | New form versions break old code | Versioned instruments + schema checks |
| Unowned indicators | Dashboard numbers nobody can recompute | Indicator dictionary + tested code |
On the health financial diaries work, live ops apps and HFCs existed precisely so quality debt did not wait for the end of a year-long follow-up.
A minimum bar for health and development teams
If a PI or programme lead asks whether the work is reproducible, I look for:
- A project folder with
raw/,scripts/,outputs/(names can vary; structure cannot)
- A short README: how to refresh HFC and main tables
- Named responsibility for the database and for analysis
- No patient or household identifiers in public repos
I do not require perfect packaging on day one. I require that the next person is not starting from mythology.