Related papers: Exploring Code Comprehension in Scientific Program…

Scientists across disciplines write code for critical activities like data collection and generation, statistical modeling, and visualization. As large language models that can generate code have become widely available, scientists may…

Scientists spend an increasing amount of time building and using software. However, most scientists are never taught how to do this efficiently. As a result, many are unaware of tools and practices that would allow them to write more…

Reading code is an essential activity in software maintenance and evolution. Several studies with human subjects have investigated how different factors, such as the employed programming constructs and naming conventions, can impact code…

Scientific code is not production software. Scientific code participates in the evaluation of a scientific hypothesis. This imposes specific constraints on the code that are often overlooked in practice. We articulate, with a small example,…

Background: Research software is software developed by and/or used by researchers, across a wide variety of domains, to perform their research. Because of the complexity of research software, developers cannot conduct exhaustive testing. As…

Context: Scientific software plays an important role in critical decision making, for example making weather predictions based on climate models, and computation of evidence for research publications. Recently, scientists have had to…

Software is now a vital scientific instrument, providing the tools for data collection and analysis across disciplines from bioinformatics and computational physics, to the humanities. The software used in research is often home-grown and…

Background: Research software is crucial for enabling research discoveries and supporting data analysis, simulation, and interpretation across domains. However, evolving requirements, complex inputs, and legacy dependencies hinder the…

The readability of source code is key for understanding and maintaining software systems and tests. Several studies investigate the readability of source code, but there is limited research on the readability of test code and related…

Scientific computation is a discipline that combines numerical analysis, physical understanding, algorithm development, and structured programming. Several yottacycles per year on the world's largest computers are spent simulating problems…

Background: Research software plays an important role in solving real-life problems, empowering scientific innovations, and handling emergency situations. Therefore, the correctness and trustworthiness of research software are of absolute…

An essential part of research and scientific communication is researchers' ability to reproduce the results of others. While there have been increasing standards for authors to make data and code available, many of these files are hard to…

Research software (also called scientific software) is essential for advancing scientific endeavours. Research software encapsulates complex algorithms and domain-specific knowledge and is a fundamental component of all science. A pervasive…

Many data science students and practitioners don't see the value in making time to learn and adopt good coding practices as long as the code "works". However, code standards are an important part of modern data science practice, and they…

Programming is essential to modern scientific research, yet most scientists report inadequate training for the software development their work demands. Generative AI tools capable of code generation may support scientific programmers, but…

Computational methods and associated software implementations are central to every field of scientific investigation. Modern biological research, particularly within systems biology, has relied heavily on the development of software tools…

The quality of scientific code is a critical concern for the research community. Poorly written code can result in irreproducible results, incorrect findings, and slower scientific progress. In this study, we evaluate scientific code…

With the advent of open source software, a veritable treasure trove of previously proprietary software development data was made available. This opened the field of empirical software engineering research to anyone in academia. Data that is…

Scientific software often presents very particular requirements regarding usability, which is often completely overlooked in this setting. As computational science has emerged as its own discipline, distinct from theoretical and…

Scientific processes rely on software as an important tool for data acquisition, analysis, and discovery. Over the years sustainable software development practices have made progress in being considered as an integral component of research.…