[vharuck]

>the process it interactive, and not trivially repeatable.

The kind of interaction you're describing should be frowned upon. It requires the audience to trust the manual data edits are no different than rerunning the analysis. But the researcher should just rerun the analysis.

Also, mixing old and new results is a common problem in manually updated papers. It can be avoided by using reproducible research tools like R Markdown.

[James_Henry]

If it can't be trivially repeated, then you should publish what you have with an explanation of how you got it. Saying that "the researcher should just rerun the analysis" is not taking into account the fact that this could be very expensive and that you can learn a lot from observations that come from messy systems. Science is about more than just perfect experiments.