Do not trust my or any computational research

This will be the second meeting of 2023 even though it's April. It's another virtual meeting, starting at 19:00 (7pm) on Tuesday 4th April.

Vincent Knight will give a talk:

Title: Do not trust my or any computational research:

Abstract:

In research, peer review is considered a pillar of trust. This is problematic. A lot of research is, at best, not reproducible or, sometimes, even wrong, despite peer review.

This talk will discuss the origins of peer review, problems with peer review and some things that could be better. In this talk I will describe the research publication pipeline that is based on peer review.

Peer review in some sense resembles what happens on an open source software pull request but it is also fundamentally different. For example it is often a somewhat secretive affair with ambiguous comments from referees with no room for discussion. I will discuss the historic origins of peer review and highlight a number of problems that are prevalent as a result.

I hope that this talk will not only be of interest to Python users doing research but also to the wider Python community who might be interested in understanding what "trust the research" means.

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