Documentation

The ability to reproduce a given experiment or analysis depends heavily on the level of and care given to documentation. Fortunately, there exist documentation tools and philosophies that can aid scientists in this often time-consuming endeavor.

For the laboratory, there are electronic notebooks and wikis that may serve as documentation aids. For the side of reproducible analysis the principals of Literate programming are central to good reproducible practices.

Notable documentation software

There are widely used tools like Sphinx and Doxygen for document generation. Wiki maintains a table comparison of document generation tools. lpEdit gives users the option to use LaTeX or reStructuredText. lpEdit is not targeting the automatic generation of documention, however the autodoc tools that come with Sphinx can be easily integrated into a project.