Reverse-engineering results in a published research paper

Question

I am trying to implement work in someone else's published IEEE research paper, to verify its results and observe some data. To fully implement what was done, I will need to implement the published algorithm - this will involve some reverse-engineering of what was done in the paper.

Normally, when I face particular programming problems, I might use Stack Overflow or other sites to ask specific questions. Given that doing so it this case would reveal that I was reverse-engineering published work, are there any specific professional or ethical issues around the reverse-engineering aspect of this?

Answer 1

Reimplementing published methods is a perfectly valid and common thing to do. Research papers should describe the utilized methods to enable other people to reperform the experiments and verify the results, so I don't see a reason not to speak publicly about what you're doing.