[bip] Reproducible research

[James Taylor]

Um... no. If nobody can reproduce it, it is not science. Just because  
you can trick some reviewers into accepting your work without  
rigorously verifying it, doesn't make it true. And plodding along in  
this way is incredibly damaging to the progress of science. Ideas with  
no support can easily come to be accepted as fact.

And why do I care about the exact version of NR? Because when I go  
back and try to use your methods and find that I don't get the same  
answer, and perhaps get a completely contradictory answer, I want to  
be able to know why. I need to be able to look at the data you used,  
compared to current data, and figure out what the difference is, what  
misled the analysis, whether it is a real problem or an artificial  
difference, et cetera.

This standard *must* be applied. Questions about whether results are  
interesting or important mean *nothing* if you (the reader) can't  
trust the results in the first place.

-- jt

On Mar 9, 2009, at 9:39 AM, C. Titus Brown wrote:

> And yet... presumably you agree science Has Been Done, in  
> bioinformatics
> and elsewhere?  Despite the generally rather abysmal quality of  
> Methods
> sections and the lack of open source software using version-locked
> databases?  Methinks you have a contradiction ;)