A figure in a paper is only trustworthy if you can say what produced it. Fieldnotes now answers that question for you.

Record what went in, not just what came out. As well as the files a run produced, you can record the files it consumed. A simulation writes a data file; a plotting script reads that data file and writes a figure. Two ordinary runs, each logged on its own.

The chain is worked out, never typed. Fieldnotes matches one run's outputs to another run's inputs and derives the link between them. You never write a connection by hand, and there is nothing to keep up to date. Ask about a figure and you get the plotting script that drew it, the data it read, the simulation that produced that data, and the parameters behind the whole thing.

It survives the code changing. Each run carries its own snapshot of the script as it was on the day, so a run from eighteen months ago still shows the code that actually made it, not today's version of the same file.

Ask by file, not by memory. Search for any file, output or input, and every run that touched it comes back, producers and consumers alike. That is usually the real question: which run made this plot?

The whole pattern, with worked examples for both ways researchers organise their analysis: fieldnotes.sh/docs/tracing-the-chain