The role of programming code sharing in improving the transparency of medical research

Abbasi says that the importance of sharing data and code from research is obvious.1 As epidemiologists, our research involves using large routine healthcare databases, for which data sharing is not a legal possibility. Although data sharing may not be possible, code sharing, in which the programming code used to process and analyse the data is made public, usually is. Encouraging code sharing is important for epidemiological studies.Proposed benefits include facilitation of direct replication efforts, detection of errors, and adaptation of best practice software engineering principles.23456 Code sharing might also help detect fraudulent research. For example, considering the retraction of several Surgisphere articles,7 a code sharing mandate might have flagged concerns with these papers earlier, given how difficult it would be to generate code for data management and analysis that never took place. This is particularly important since the kind of data which purportedly formed part of the Surgisphere database could…
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