In May’s Hacky Hour, we did a code review exercise using the 17-step checklist for Ecology and Evolution. Participants reviewed each other’s code or that of already published papers and discussed what would constitute the “perfect” piece of Open, Reliable and Transparent (ORT) code.
In this month’s Training Session, Stefan Vriend, Freddy Hillemann and Joey Burant hosted a workshop on how to code review a manuscript, using a checklist they developed for Ecology and Evolution.
Introduction Scientific research has led to multiple advancements and methodological innovations. However, modern scientists function under constant time pressure to produce a high number of publications and statistically significant results, thus sometimes they resort to questionable research practices. In a survey that examined how widespread these practices are in the field of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, the majority of participants admitted to having implemented a questionable practice in the past.
The Member Engagement Committee runs Code Club every third Tuesday of the month. Time can vary depending on the host and will be announced at least two weeks in advance on SORTEE’s Slack. In this month’s Hacky Hour, 9 participants shared their code mistakes, starting up the SORTEE library of code mistakes! The goal is twofold: the normalization of coding errors and building a resource of (common) code mistakes that you can use during code review.
The Member Engagement Committee is breathing new life into the peer code review club: we will run Code Club every third Tuesday of the month. Time can vary depending on the host and will be announced at least two weeks in advance. With 13 participants, we kicked off the first Code Club of 2024, learning how code review can make coding a more collaborative process in the scientific research cycle.
“We were unable to reproduce your results, and I think the reason is that there is a bug in how you are calculating your correlation coefficients.” That was part of an email I got this summer that absolutely crushed me. It doesn’t take much empathy to feel that knot in your stomach and existential dread from imposter syndrome, especially if you are currently a graduate student, post-doc, or another early-career researcher.
[This post has been originally posted on ecoevotransparency.org] Physicist Carl Sagan famously said “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” I think its useful to extend this to the distinctly less elegant “surprising findings are less likely to be true, and thus require a higher standard of evidence.” I started thinking more about what influences the reliability of a scientific result when analyses of my post-doc data weren’t lining up with published findings from other studies of the same species.
[This post has been originally posted on ecoevotransparency.org] Just how reproducible are studies in ecology and evolutionary biology? We don’t know precisely, but a new case study in the journal Evolution shows that even textbook knowledge can be unreliable. Daiping Wang, Wolfgang Forstmeier, and co-authors have convinced me of the unreliability of an iconic finding in behavioral ecology, and I hope their results brings our field one step closer to a systematic assessment of reproducibility.
[This post has been originally posted on ecoevotransparency.org] In this post, I float some ideas that I’ve had about the ‘reproducibility crisis’ as it is emerging in ecology and evolutionary biology, and how this emergence may or may not differ from what is happening in other disciplines, in particular psychology. Two other experts on this topic (Fiona Fidler and David Mellor) respond to my ideas, and propose some different ideas as well.
[This post has been originally posted on ecoevotransparency.org] The problem As you probably already know, researchers in some fields are finding that it’s often not possible to reproduce others’ findings. Fields like psychology and cancer biology have undertaken large-scale coordinated projects aimed at determining how reproducible their research is. There has been no such attempt in ecology and evolutionary biology. A starting point Earlier this year Bruna, Chazdon, Errington and Nosek wrote an article citing the need to start this process by reproducing foundational studies.
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