4 ms·
I remember a decade or so ago, the only way for me to figure out certain material values (this was material science / electrical engineering / chemistry) was to
by archgoon 7y ago
I remember a decade or so ago, the only way for me to figure out certain material values (this was material science / electrical engineering / chemistry) was to open up MSPaint and manually draw lines on chart data to find intercepts. Has the field gotten better about releasing raw data for papers?
Granted, this was sometimes because the only team that had measured a particular substance did it back in the 70s.
- btrettel 7y agoThere are many programs to automate that, e.g., I use g3data. Unfortunately raw data is still rarely released today. One tip if the raw data wasn't released as a computer file: Look for a dissertation associated with the journal article you want data from. Dissertations often have tabulated data in an appendix.
- mkl 7y agoIf you have the plot as a PDF or PostScript file you can sometimes write a script to extract the data directly from the coordinates of the plot elements (for PDF, uncompress the file with PDFTK, and then the commands are ~readable text). Sometimes the values extracted from plots contain more precision than values reported in tables. It can be quite fiddly, though, so it might not be worth the effort unless you really need it, or you need to do it a lot with many similar figures.
- tgb 7y agoIt varies by field. Some have standard repositories for data to go in - all RNA seq experiments get their raw data uploaded to GEO or similar, for example. But they usually don't specify their pipeline sufficiently precisely to be able to recreate the exact analysis done.
- noobermin 7y agoNot always, but for more reason papers, you could always shoot someone an email and ask for data.