Researchers at the University of Hawaii accidentally discovered that an 2014 study on cyanobacteria, cited more than 1.900 later in other publications, had relied on an erroneous computer script. What to create scientific errors chain.
Consequences that are difficult to assess
While they determined that the 2014 document was viewed nearly 1.900 times and cited in 158 other studies, it may still be that not all of the studies that cited the article used the bogus script. "This simple bug in the original script calls into question the conclusions of several articles on a wide range of subjects (…)", reads their publication. "Authors who have used these scripts should definitely recheck their results using the newly modified scripts." Min spite of everything, it remains impossible to know precisely which studies might have been affected by this error, for the simple reason that the operating systems used by researchers are only very rarely mentioned in the conclusions of their work.
The scripts were designed six years ago by Patrick Willoughby, Matthew Jansma and Thomas Hoye to calculate chemical shift values for nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, a process for evaluating local magnetic fields around nuclei atomic. Patrick Willoughby responded in a tweet to the discovery: "Really great find by Rui and Prof. Williams. When I wrote the scripts six years ago, the operating system was able to handle sorting. Rui and Williams added the necessary sorting code and a function to ensure the correct alignment of the calculations. Glory to them! "
Back to "Agriculture: problems and pollution, new techniques and solutions"
Users browsing this forum : No registered users and 353 guests
