Reproducescript: Reducing the efforts to create reproducible analysis code with FieldTrip

The analysis of EEG and MEG data typically requires a lengthy and complicated sequence of analysis steps, often requiring large amounts of computations, which are ideally represented in analysis scripts. These scripts are often written by researchers without formal training in computer science, resulting in the quality and readability of these analysis scripts to be highly dependent on individual coding expertise and style. Even though the computational outcomes and interpretation of the results can be correct, the inconsistent style and quality of analysis scripts make reviewing the details of the analysis difficult for other researchers that are either involved in the study or not, and the quality of the scripts might compromise the reproducibility of obtained results. This paper describes the design and implementation of a strategy that allows complete reproduction of MATLAB-based scripts without little extra efforts on behalf of the user, which we implemented as part of the FieldTrip toolbox. Starting from the researchers’ idiosyncratic pipeline scripts, this new functionality allows researchers to automatically create and publish standardized analysis pipeline scripts, along with all relevant intermediate data. We demonstrate the functionality and validate its effectiveness by applying it to the analysis of a recently published MEG study.

This collection contains the data, the original code, and the reproduced code for demonstrating FieldTrip's reproducescript functionality. The original and reproduced scripts for example 1 and 2 are shared here, including the data for 4 subjects which originates from the FieldTrip tutorials. Example 3 uses the code from Andersen (2018, https://doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2018.00261), which was forked to and copied from https://github.com/matsvanes/omission_frontiers after commit 279650994ff9c5b9720e05fa052bdcd2101ad4d0. The raw data for example 3 can be downloaded from https://zenodo.org/record/1134776.