Files related to Improving ecological data science with workflow management software

This repository contains files related to the publication, Improving ecological data science with workflow management software (Brousil et al. 2023).

The repository contains files related to two items:

1. Building Figure 2, a time series of publications referencing "workflow management software" or "data pipeline" within Web of Science. (abstract_figure/ subdirectory)
2. An example of a small workflow written both as a targets workflow and a traditional single-script R workflow (example_workflow/ subdirectory)

abstract_figure/ subdirectory

Running the scripts/evidence_synthesis_wms.R file in this subdirectory should execute the entire process of downloading the short dataset needed to generate the figure and then plotting it and saving it as a PNG file in figures/.

example_workflow subdirectory

Datasets provided in data/ are simulated and created in the script setup_data.R. The file non_targets_script.R is a self-contained short workflow. It provides identical results as the targets workflow, which can be initiated using the run.R script. Steps ("targets") for this workflow version are outlined in _targets.R.