Best practice for sharing analytical code: a bookdown wiki built on the TADA guidelines.
The TADA-Wiki is a practical reference on how to share the analytical code behind a paper so that someone else can actually run it.
It is built around TADA (Transferable, Available, Documented, Annotated) and sets those four guidelines alongside the practices that go with them: metadata, licences, repository choice, the SORTEE guidelines for data and code quality control, and code review.
The wiki exists because the gap between policy and practice is wide. In ecology and evolutionary biology, 88% of journals had code-sharing policies by 2024, yet only 5–35% of articles share code, and of the code that is shared, 74% of archived R files in one large study failed to run without error. TADA sets a minimum standard that closes most of that gap, and is achievable by researchers at any level of coding experience.
Read it at: https://eivimeycook.github.io/TADA-Wiki/
| Chapter | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Welcome | What the wiki is, TADA in four cards, where the guidance comes from |
| Start here | Pre-submission checklist, project layout, three common causes of failure |
| TADA at a glance | Why TADA exists, the evidence, how it maps onto FAIR |
| Transferable | File types, relative paths, here / pyprojroot, dependency managers, containers and workflow managers |
| Available | Persistent identifiers, why GitHub is not an archive, repository comparison, embargoes and anonymisation |
| Documented | The README field by field, a worked example, choosing and attaching code and data licences |
| Annotated | Chunk-level comments, signposting, collapsible sections, literate formats |
| Data & code sharing | Raw vs processed data, file formats, metadata, licences in brief |
| The SORTEE guidelines | The six stages a data editor checks, common failures, advice for authors |
| Code review | The four Rs, when review happens, running a code club, a reviewer's script |
| Further reading | Guides, tools, repositories, communities |
| Glossary | Plain-language definitions of the terms used across the wiki |
| Contribute | How to add a page, with a template |
| References | Everything cited |
The wiki is a synthesis of three papers:
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Ivimey-Cook, E. R., Culina, A., Dimri, S., Grainger, M. J., Kar, F., Lagisz, M., Moran, N. P., Nakagawa, S., Roche, D. G., Tattan, S., Sánchez-Tójar, A., Windecker, S. M., & Pick, J. L. TADA! Simple guidelines to improve analytical code sharing for transparency and reproducibility. Worked example: https://github.com/EIvimeyCook/TADA
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Pick, J. L., et al. (2026). The SORTEE guidelines for data and code quality control in ecology and evolutionary biology. Peer Community Journal 6: e20. https://doi.org/10.24072/pcjournal.687
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Ivimey-Cook, E. R., et al. (2023). Implementing code review in the scientific workflow: Insights from ecology and evolutionary biology. Journal of Evolutionary Biology 36: 1347–1356. https://doi.org/10.1111/jeb.14230
Where the wiki extends beyond these papers, with worked examples, comparison tables, checklists and the reviewer's script, that material is labelled wiki guidance rather than presented as a finding of the papers. That separation is the sourcing rule for contributors.
Every claim taken from the source papers, or from other published work, is linked inline: click a citation to go to its DOI, or hover it to see the full reference (title, journal, DOI) without leaving the page.
Corrections, additions and new chapters are all welcome — especially language-specific guidance and adaptations to disciplines beyond ecology and evolutionary biology.
- Something wrong or out of date? Open an issue.
- Adding a page? The Contribute chapter on the wiki has the full conventions — cross-references, callouts, tabs, the sourcing rule above, and how to register a new chapter.
If this wiki is useful to you, please cite the underlying papers rather than
the wiki. Cite the TADA guidelines for the code-sharing advice, the SORTEE
guidelines for data and code quality control, and Ivimey-Cook et al. (2023) for
code review — full details in CITATION.cff and in the References chapter.
To cite the wiki itself, GitHub's Cite this repository button reads
CITATION.cff, or:
Ivimey-Cook, E. R. (2026). TADA-Wiki: Best practice for sharing analytical code. https://github.com/EIvimeyCook/TADA-Wiki
Edward R. Ivimey-Cook — e.ivimeycook@gmail.com
- Code, meaning the build script,
assets/style.css,assets/tada.js,assets/tada-cite.js,assets/tada-citations.js, and the templates, under the MIT License. - Content, meaning the wiki text in the
.Rmdchapters, under CC BY 4.0.
The three PDFs in docs/papers/ remain under their original licences. The SORTEE
guidelines paper is open access under CC BY 4.0.
Claude (Anthropic) was used to draft and structure the wiki chapters from the
three source papers, and to write the CSS and JavaScript in assets/. All
content was subsequently checked against the source papers by the author.