Within months of starting his undergraduate at Stanford University, 18-year-old Theo Baker was already on the trail of a story that would lead him to become the youngest George Polk award winner in American journalism history.
That would only work if you’d be able to see all underlying raw data.
A paper without the underlying raw data, is like a bicycle without wheels: you know it might’ve been useful at some point, but it isn’t anymore.
Very few papers publish both the raw data, and the analysis tools used on it, for everyone to verify their results.
The rest, are no different than a 4th grader writing down an answer, then when a teacher asks them to “show your work”, they come back with “no, trust me, my peers agree I’m right, you do your own work”.
It’s extra sad when you contact a researcher directly for the data, and you get any of “it got lost in the last lab move”, “I’m only giving it if you show me how you going to process it first”, or some clearly spotty data backfilled from the paper’s conclusions.
A paper without the underlying raw data, is like a bicycle without wheels: you know it might’ve been useful at some point, but it isn’t anymore.
Very few papers publish both the raw data, and the analysis tools used on it, for everyone to verify their results.
The rest, are no different than a 4th grader writing down an answer, then when a teacher asks them to “show your work”, they come back with “no, trust me, my peers agree I’m right, you do your own work”.
It’s extra sad when you contact a researcher directly for the data, and you get any of “it got lost in the last lab move”, “I’m only giving it if you show me how you going to process it first”, or some clearly spotty data backfilled from the paper’s conclusions.