The scientific pipeline runs inside an administrative one: funding milestones, ethics renewals, reporting deadlines, personnel changes, and the decisions that shaped the project but were never written down.
The last of those causes the most pain in practice. Two years in, nobody remembers why a particular exclusion threshold was chosen, and the reasoning is not in the code, the manuscript, or anyone’s memory. A decision log kept alongside the analysis — dated, with the reasoning and the alternatives considered — costs minutes and repays them at writing-up time.
Related¶
Zettelkasten — a note-taking approach that suits decision logs