A Code Glitch May Have Caused Errors In More Than 100 Published Studies

guest · Oct 15, 2019

A Code Glitch May Have Caused Errors In More Than 100 Published Studies
October 10, 2019
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/...sed-errors-in-more-than-100-published-studies

Scientists in Hawaiʻi have uncovered a glitch in a piece of code that could have yielded incorrect results in over 100 published studies that cited the original paper.

The glitch caused results of a common chemistry computation to vary depending on the operating system used, causing discrepancies among Mac, Windows, and Linux systems. The researchers published the revelation and a debugged version of the script, which amounts to roughly 1,000 lines of code, on Tuesday in the journal Organic Letters.

“This simple glitch in the original script calls into question the conclusions of a significant number of papers on a wide range of topics in a way that cannot be easily resolved from published information because the operating system is rarely mentioned,” the new paper reads.
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[...] Luo used a script written in Python that was published as part of a 2014 paper by Patrick Willoughby [...] Luo’s results did not match up with the NMR values that Williams’ group had previously calculated, and according to Sun, when his students ran the code on their computers, they realized that different operating systems were producing different results.

It is unclear how many papers this glitch may have affected—researchers do not typically disclose the operating system they use for their analyses since it should be irrelevant, Williams said.
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A Code Glitch May Have Caused Errors In More Than 100 Published Studies

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