Publishing Research Code

When scientific code is not required to be published with its research literature who really knows how bad it is?

My 2 cents: you should publish the code as you used it in your research, so that it's possible to review your code. If there is a bug in your code, that could impact your results, and that problem would be much harder to find/reproduce without your source code.

As someone who has had to reproduce others' research results: it is much much better to release the unclean, unorganized code that actually produced your results than it is to release nothing. Even if it doesn't run (e.g. it depends on a hardware system that the user won't have access to) it's still better for people to be able to read your code and understand some tricky part that isn't fully explained in your paper.

Sounds like academia needs to insist on better coding standards. Publishing your code isn't worth much if the code is an unmanageable mess. Still better than not publishing your code I guess, but how reliable are scientific results when they've been processed by code of which nobody knows how it works?

Wow, I never considered that this might fall under the same umbrella. It seems very reasonable because it isn't very hard to publish that now. Even if the shared code wouldn't run without a ton of requirements and very specific setup, it's still something. I know we all hate to release code that doesn't compile or run outside our own setup because we then feel we will be responsible for helping someone else getting it to run on their machines to which we have no physical a

Research code is infinitely better than no code. Research papers are almost never complete enough to reimplement it (seriously - I met a lot of academicians doing it, and most of the time it was not possible without contacting authors; just - text does not compile).Vide:http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/23237

I thought code written for science papers was generally crap (from a maintenance/review perspective, because the people who write it are scientists first and programmers second), and often not published anyway? The idea behind not publishing being that if someone tries to reproduce your work, it's best to make certain the won't reproduce your coding bugs by copying (and also that publishing crap code is embarrassing)...

most cs papers i read (actually all) do -not- include code (or input data). which makes this an issue even in the case of cs.

In a perfect world, studies should not only be required to include the code, any of the following should also be a reason to reject a publication:* The code can't be run outside the original researcher's undocumented special snowflake system* A fellow scientist who understands the domain can't understand what the code is doing and so is unable to verify that it isn't making any mistakes* It'd be really nice if there were some sort of test cases that could verify

At the end of the day the impact and perceived quality of your research correlates to how peer reviewed it is, and how reproducible it is. Everything necessary to reproduce your research should be published, including the code. However, if you publish cleaned up versions of your code, that isn't the code you used to do your research.I suggest publishing the code as is on something such as Github, Gitlab, etc. I suspect you have ideas on how you can improve the code, perhaps there's