[bip] Reproducible research

[Andrew Dalke]

On Mar 6, 2009, at 9:39 PM, C. Titus Brown wrote:
> It's true across the board; experimental protocols suffer from the  
> same
> problem, and I'm sure that in, say, chemistry, you run into the same
> issue too.  There's very little incentive for an accurate  
> description of
> the process by which you arrived at your results.

This was a fun read, from the "In the Pipeline" blog, which deals
with pharmaceutical chemistry:

http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2009/02/27/ 
your_paper_is_a_sack_of_raving_nonsense_thank_you.php

It's about a paper in the journal "Organic Process Research and  
Development"

> Some journals [are more reproducible] than others, of course,  
> (another topic!) but OPRD is known to be very, very reproducible  
> indeed. As it should be: it’s a journal for process chemists, whose  
> livelihood is refining chemical routes until they’re scalable,  
> economical, and (very importantly) until they work exactly the same  
> way every time they’re run.
>
>




Someone in the comments said:
> I once tried to reproduce a prep from OrgSyn, a publication
> from which all preps are checked by other groups.

followed by a recounting of a case which wasn't reproducible.

For reference, the Organic Synthesis journal home page says

http://www.orgsyn.org/
> Each procedure is written in considerably more detail as compared  
> to typical experimental procedures in other journals, and each  
> reaction and all characterization data has been carefully "checked"  
> for reproducibility in the laboratory of a member of the Board of  
> Editors.
>


I wonder why that "checked" is in quotes...

Titus:
> I am mildly skeptical that there's significant value to demanding
> exact reproducibility in many circumstances.

There's some quote about how a peer-review publication is only the  
first step
to a result being accepted as correct.

				Andrew
				dalke at dalkescientific.com