AUTHOR=Kubilius Jonas 

TITLE=A framework for streamlining research workflow in neuroscience and psychology

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Neuroinformatics

VOLUME=7

YEAR=2014

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/neuroinformatics/articles/10.3389/fninf.2013.00052

DOI=10.3389/fninf.2013.00052

ISSN=1662-5196

ABSTRACT=<p>Successful accumulation of knowledge is critically dependent on the ability to verify and replicate every part of scientific conduct. However, such principles are difficult to enact when researchers continue to resort on <italic>ad-hoc</italic> workflows and with poorly maintained code base. In this paper I examine the needs of neuroscience and psychology community, and introduce <italic>psychopy_ext</italic>, a unifying framework that seamlessly integrates popular experiment building, analysis and manuscript preparation tools by choosing reasonable defaults and implementing relatively rigid patterns of workflow. This structure allows for automation of multiple tasks, such as generated user interfaces, unit testing, control analyses of stimuli, single-command access to descriptive statistics, and publication quality plotting. Taken together, <italic>psychopy_ext</italic> opens an exciting possibility for a faster, more robust code development and collaboration for researchers.</p>