Blogs

Debrief of SORTEE Code Club: Code Review Checklist for Ecology and Evolution - Tuesday April 16

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.

Continue reading

Debunking myths around open data

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.

Continue reading

Debrief of SORTEE Code Club: Hacky Hour - Tuesday March 19

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.

Continue reading

Debrief of SORTEE Code Club: Kickoff Meeting - Tuesday February 20

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.

Continue reading

Modern Palaeoanthropology advances towards greater openness and accessibility

In 1912, Charles Dawson, an amateur antiquarian and solicitor, along with Arthur Smith Woodward, the Curator of Geology at the Natural History Museum of London, proclaimed the discovery of the ‘missing link’ bridging the gap between apes and humans. They claimed to have found a fragment of a skull resembling that of a human in Pleistocene gravel beds near Piltdown village in Sussex, England. Additionally, they uncovered mandible fragments that were posited to belong to the same individual.

Continue reading

Setting the record straight: how data and code transparency caught an error and how I fixed it

“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.

Continue reading