rctrack: An R package to track details for reproducible computing

We have developed the rctrack package that automatically collects and archives read-only copies of program files, data files, and other details needed to computationally reproduce research results. The rctrack package was developed to minimize user burden so that it can be immediately useful in practice. The rctrack package only requires statements to initiate (“begin.rctrack()”) and terminate (“end.rctrack()”) collection of details for reproducible computing; no additional programming effort is required. The method is being published by Liu Z et al (2014) in BMC Bioinformatics.

The method is implemented in rctrack R package written for the freely available statistical computing language R.

To Install rctrack:

• Download rctrack_1.2.tar.gz and execute the command install.packages("download.dir/rctrack_1.2.tar.gz",repos=NULL,type="source") in R, where download.dir is the directory to which the file was saved.
• To receive alerts regarding software updates, send an e-mail with "Updates on rctrack Software" in the subject line.

More questions? Contact Stan Pounds.