Timeline for Why don't authors include in their publications the duration of the research?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
24 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jul 27, 2018 at 11:16 | comment | added | ZeroTheHero | who cares and why is this relevant to value or validity of the research? | |
| Jul 27, 2018 at 2:00 | answer | added | user96454 | timeline score: 3 | |
| Jul 26, 2018 at 22:34 | comment | added | Michael MacAskill | In one paper, I wrote "The dataset, obtained on 25 January 2013, took approximately 11 min to collect." peerj.com/articles/67 Of course, it took many hours of testing to create the script that collected the data, and much longer to think about the results, visualise them, and write the manuscript... | |
| Jul 26, 2018 at 21:31 | answer | added | WBT | timeline score: 1 | |
| Jul 26, 2018 at 18:03 | comment | added | alephzero | If you want to replicate an experiment, the important question is how long it will take you to do the replication, not how long it took the original experimenter. The only person who can answer that question is you. The tools you have available, and your experience of doing similar work, may be orders of magnitude higher or lower than what was used in the original paper. | |
| Jul 26, 2018 at 15:46 | comment | added | 1006a | You might want to specify the field where you're (not) seeing this. In most social sciences, for example, it would be extremely unusual not to mention the period of time covered by the study, whether it's a two-hour intervention, a two-year participant-observation, or a multi-decade longitudinal study. | |
| Jul 26, 2018 at 9:24 | answer | added | Agent_L | timeline score: 1 | |
| Jul 25, 2018 at 21:00 | history | tweeted | twitter.com/StackAcademia/status/1022225185632649226 | ||
| Jul 25, 2018 at 20:00 | comment | added | David Richerby | @corey979 It's not clear that stating the amount of compute time required does much beyond memorializing how slow computers were in the past. | |
| Jul 25, 2018 at 16:30 | comment | added | user68958 | @JonCuster No, I didn't - because that's not my project :p | |
| Jul 25, 2018 at 15:38 | comment | added | Jon Custer | @corey979 - and, likely, in that 4 year gap you were doing things that somehow related to the stalled project but were not directly applicable... | |
| Jul 25, 2018 at 15:13 | answer | added | Matt | timeline score: 13 | |
| Jul 25, 2018 at 15:05 | answer | added | AppliedAcademic | timeline score: 4 | |
| Jul 25, 2018 at 13:52 | answer | added | Andreas Blass | timeline score: 68 | |
| Jul 25, 2018 at 10:34 | comment | added | user9482 | In my field, someone who has a reasonable chance of completing a study successfully would know roughly how long it will take. There is usually no benefit for including this information in the manuscript. Of course, the precise duration of the actual experiment is often provided in the manuscript. | |
| Jul 25, 2018 at 9:34 | comment | added | user68958 | Although indeed, information like we used a 2800 cores supercomputer to perform the computations, which took about a month of real time should be provided in the papers. This is an info that was completely lacking in a relevant for my work paper, that I had to e-mail the authors to even learn they used a supercomputer (and there are supercomputers and supercomputers - some with ~hundreds, some with ~millions of cores). | |
| Jul 25, 2018 at 9:31 | comment | added | user68958 | My friend submitted recently a paper about a work started 5 yrs ago; but saying the research took 5 yrs is not true: the idea & initial analysis were done 5 yrs ago, but next for 4 yrs the project was hibernated, to be finished this year. How much time did it take: 5 yrs or 6 mths? And going into details like two few-months periods divided by a 4 yrs gap seems completely irrelevant. I think that in fields that it really matters, such information is provided (psychological interviews over the course of ~30 years etc.), but it doesn't matter in e.g. maths if it took 1 or 3 yrs for the proof. | |
| Jul 25, 2018 at 9:31 | comment | added | Don_S | Well, if you have an experiment that takes on average 4 hours, and you plan to run it 10 times, you can assume that the entire set of experiments will have taken any time between a few days and a month (due to all these other events you mentioned). In that case, it would be helpful for a young researcher\student to know that a single run of the experiment is supposed to take a few hours (and not days, for example), and that the entire experimental part of the study is expected to take about a month (and not 6\9\12 months). I agree it can't be accurate, it would be more a matter of scales. | |
| Jul 25, 2018 at 9:27 | answer | added | Dirk | timeline score: 25 | |
| Jul 25, 2018 at 9:24 | comment | added | user68958 | An exact amount of time (e.g., the research took 357 hours of intellectual work) is impossible to provide. On the other hand, say an idea popped out on March 2015, and the paper was submitted 2 yrs later. Did the research take 2 yrs? Not really: during that time 5 other projects were completed, there were holiday twice, time used for writing a grant proposal for the 6th project, one of the team members was hospitalized for a few months, etc. etc. So, what time interval do you want to hear in this situation (which is a pretty normal framework in research)? (...) | |
| Jul 25, 2018 at 9:23 | comment | added | Maarten Buis | If you know what to do then you can make your own estimate of how much time it will take. Much of the time in the original article will have been spent on figuring out what to do, so that information is not going to help you. | |
| Jul 25, 2018 at 9:22 | comment | added | Don_S | That's true, but it still would be helpful to know if what I'm reading took 1 year or 5 years to complete. Even rough estimations of the length of the experiment(s) can give some idea about its complexity, tediousness, etc. | |
| Jul 25, 2018 at 9:19 | comment | added | Solar Mike | The time to design & build an experiment from scratch is not necessarliy the same as that required to repeat an experiment when the issues have been solved. | |
| Jul 25, 2018 at 9:12 | history | asked | Don_S | CC BY-SA 4.0 |