[randcraw]

Regardless of the term chosen, the concept of 'provenance' described here is the essential purpose behind the scientific notebooks used daily by experimentalists in industry and academia. Without thoroughly recording the bases for your experiment it almost surely will not be reproducible.

Where I work, (a large pharmaceutical), these notebooks are taken very seriously by biologists, chemists, and chemical engineers, and increasingly are shaping the mindset of our data scientists (who have yet to adopt them).

Given the longstanding practice of documenting experiment design and method, I think it's probably long overdue that the exploratory analysis of experiment-based data must also adopt more rigorous governance to ensure that necessity and sufficiency are ensured when drawing inferences from experiment, especially when the data used was not originally intended to answer the current question posed.