Context:

I've recently adopted version control as part of my data analysis work (finally I may hear you saying: see my earlier question on SO). This prompted me to think more about repositories and the directory structure I use for my projects.

My typical research work involves one or more studies (i.e., data that I have collected) which gets written up as one or more publications (journal articles, book chapters, presentations, reports, etc.). Analyses and reports are typically produced using a combination of R, LaTeX, Sweave, textual data files and so on. I really like the idea of being able to upload a single self-contained repository that can be used to analyse data and reproduce a publication.

In particular, I've been thinking about publications, studies, data, and common code, and how these entities map on to repositories. For example, is it better to have a separate repository for each publication or is it better to have each publication as an individual folder within the larger repository. I'm evolving a few thoughts on this, but I was keen to hear other options.

Question:

• What strategies do people use to map studies, publications, and analyses onto repositories?
• When should related entities (e.g., publications, studies, etc.) be split into multiple repositories?