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I am doing theoretical study of a material and in my recent work I have compared my calculated results with experimental results from another published work. During review, the reviewer has mentioned

In any case, the experimental data should certainly be reproduced and presented in the figures together with the calculation results

What does that mean? How should I proceed?

Thomas
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1 Answers1

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The reviewer appears to say that you should plot both experimental data and calculation results, perhaps in the same or a nearby figure, to allow a direct comparison between theory and experiment. In case you haven't already done so and assuming it's feasible, I'd suggest following the referee's advise. It'd make your paper more self-contained, and such plots can better demonstrate that your theoretical model describes the experiment accurately than some extracted numbers (e.g. averages) for which spurious agreement can occur more easily. You may ask the author(s) of the experimental study for data, or extract it yourself from their plots.

Anyon
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  • Thanks. So How should I obtain the original data. Should I email the authors regarding the same? – Thomas Jun 11 '20 at 16:30
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    @Thomas - try emailing them. In the old days I did things like using a Xerox machine to make a figure much bigger and then extracting data points by hand. There are available tools to extract data points from a pdf plot fairly readily. – Jon Custer Jun 11 '20 at 16:32
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    @Thomas Related: https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/1401/68109 – GoodDeeds Jun 11 '20 at 16:32
  • @Thomas I'd try that first, yes. In my experience people are usually happy to share their published data. If not, as Jon Custer says, there are tools (even online ones now) to extract data points/digitize data. But obviously that approach has some loss of precision compared to using the original data. – Anyon Jun 11 '20 at 16:37
  • Thanks. I will try a data extraction tool first. One question though. Is it OK to reproduce the work using extracted data points without the permission of original authors? – Thomas Jun 11 '20 at 16:43
  • There is a program called Datathief which is good at producing data from figures. See https://datathief.org no affiliation though. – Solar Mike Jun 11 '20 at 16:57
  • @Thomas If the data is published it's definitively OK to use it without express permission. After all, the science is done, and is there to be used. If it's in a preprint, however, the courteous thing would definitively be to ask, since otherwise they could run into "prior publication" issues with journals. Still, I'd recommend contacting the authors also for published data because i) you can get better data that way, ii) sometimes you learn additional things, and iii) it can be a form of networking. – Anyon Jun 11 '20 at 16:57