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In theory, yes. In practice, I'm not so sure. I have yet to meet a developer who reviewed another developer's project, and said > Definitely, whoever wrote t

In theory, yes. In practice, I'm not so sure. I have yet to meet a developer who reviewed another developer's project, and said > Definitely, whoever wrote this code is 100% not braindead. Academic code is written for a purpose - I'm afraid if code review became mandatory, there would be fewer papers submitted in fear of negative criticism due to a memory leak that eats up all memory if the program is running for 3 weeks (even though it finishes after 4 minutes). On the other hand, most probably reviewer would come from the same science area as the submitter, with similar level of coding knowledge. Not sure if they would be any significant help regarding the code quality. They would do the same. With that said, I would require making the code part of the paper, regardless how garbage it is.

extasia 3y ago
I understand that the goals of research code are very different from prod. code, and I suppose that the reviewers would have to tailor their review towards verifying the integrity of the results presented, rather than code quality in and of itself. Criticism would be moderated through the journal editor, as with typical review comments.
- OJFord 3y ago
  I think that's key (and I agree it would be good) - the review would have different goals/qualities in mind: more 'does the code do what you claim it does' and less 'am I going to be able to maintain this' (because probably nobody is going to maintain it and that's fine).
- cpgxiii 3y ago
  Considering how much of a pain journal editors are to deal with already in terms of text formatting, the absolute last thing needed is trying to turn them into code reviewers/meta reviewers. The pool of editors who are both competent in their scientific/technical field and competent software engineers is nonexistent - almost everyone with that combination of skills is working in the private sector and has no desire to wade into journal editing.

extasia 3y ago

I understand that the goals of research code are very different from prod. code, and I suppose that the reviewers would have to tailor their review towards verifying the integrity of the results presented, rather than code quality in and of itself. Criticism would be moderated through the journal editor, as with typical review comments.

OJFord 3y ago
I think that's key (and I agree it would be good) - the review would have different goals/qualities in mind: more 'does the code do what you claim it does' and less 'am I going to be able to maintain this' (because probably nobody is going to maintain it and that's fine).
cpgxiii 3y ago
Considering how much of a pain journal editors are to deal with already in terms of text formatting, the absolute last thing needed is trying to turn them into code reviewers/meta reviewers. The pool of editors who are both competent in their scientific/technical field and competent software engineers is nonexistent - almost everyone with that combination of skills is working in the private sector and has no desire to wade into journal editing.