Questions tagged [code]

Questions concerning computer code written or used in the context of a research project or other academic endeavour (including questions on licensing, ownership, sharing, distribution, and formatting of academic source code). For other questions on software (related to academic aspects of using the software rather then developing it), use the software tag instead. Generic code questions, e.g. help with debugging, are off-topic and will be closed.

The tag is for questions concerning computer code written or used in the context of a research project or other academic endeavour (including questions on licensing, ownership, sharing, distribution, and formatting of academic source code).

On the other hand, questions related to academic aspects of using the software rather then developing it (like e.g. on finding appropriate tool to organise bibliography or create a poster) should be asked under the .

Finally, highly technical aspects should be posted to other sites in the network, e.g. Stack Overflow.

303 questions
37
votes
10 answers

What to do when people in a research group use different programming languages for computation (e.g., Mathematica, Python, Matlab)?

I am a very happy user (in 98% of the time) of Python/Numpy/Scipy (anaconda distribution). I switched from Matlab and do not regret the decision. I have reached a level of expertise, which enables me to help others with their computational tasks and…
Moritz
  • 1,022
  • 7
  • 15
30
votes
6 answers

Can one demand to see code used to generate an article?

An article is published and the results depend heavily on a piece of code that the author wrote themselves. The author has not shared the code with the community, even though they have been using it possibly for years now. If I request the source…
Gabriel
  • 2,676
  • 2
  • 20
  • 30
24
votes
7 answers

Knowing when the code is good enough, for research

My question is in a similar vein to this one. My research requires code. I can write code and I know some things about writing good code. Both for readability, (e.g. standardised doc string, descriptive variable names, comments that describe the…
Clumsy cat
  • 6,926
  • 2
  • 27
  • 37
19
votes
4 answers

Why say source code is available with an ArXiv paper when it is not?

I sometimes come across ArXiv papers where the authors claim the source code for the project discussed can be obtained, but on checking the link provided the source code comprises no more than a place holder. So the code is not available, and on…
John Ramsden
  • 207
  • 2
  • 3
11
votes
1 answer

Can a university restrict publication of students' work due to plagiarism fears?

My question is inspired by this question. Say a student wants to publish on GitHub some code that they've written as assignments for a programming class. The student may be motivated by a desire to show off their programming skills and advance their…
Dan Romik
  • 189,176
  • 42
  • 427
  • 636
10
votes
4 answers

How to keep code and output organized?

I am having trouble keeping organized the files for the computational component of my research project. In brief, I have written computer code which I use to run computational experiments. For each experiment, I get a set of output files, from which…
I Like to Code
  • 19,300
  • 24
  • 78
  • 116
7
votes
6 answers

How to format code in a thesis (Word document)?

I have a couple of code snippets, included in my thesis. What is the most convenient way to format code in a Word document, particularly, in regard to keeping the syntax highlighting, etc.? And the guidelines say that text should use double space.…
KonVas
  • 321
  • 1
  • 3
  • 5
6
votes
1 answer

Is it OK to contact authors of the research paper requesting an implementation?

Given the research paper itself and having a complete understanding of the proposed system, I could implement the system on my own. If my intention is not to re-implement it myself, but rather study the original implementation(probably by the…
Joe Lewis
1
vote
4 answers

Is it acceptable to put programming code as proof in paper?

I used statistical language R to fit probability distribution to acquired data. Instead of doing it by hand I relied on code. I wrote something like "probability density function was computed using programming language R (for more details see…
pusheax
  • 127
  • 1
  • 5