The College of Engineering at Carnegie Mellon has an interesting article on their Web site about John Kitchin and his work on Scimax. I’ve written about Scimax several times (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7) so longtime Irreal readers will be familiar with it. If you’re new to Scimax, it’s a package of Emacs applications to make writing scientific papers easier and, in particular, to enable reproducible research: Here’s Kitchin’s Web page on the package.
The CMU article mentions several of Irreal’s favorite topics: Emacs, Org-mode, Writing with Emacs, and reproducible research. In the article, Kitchin makes the point that if your research can’t be verified, no one can tell if it’s the truth or not. Without reproducibility, anyone can say anything and you have to take them at their word. Kitchin says that the point of Scimax is not just to make writing papers easier but to increase the level of research integrity by making its results replicable.