Communications of the ACM
A Code Glitch May Have Caused Errors In More Than 100 Published Studies
Scientists in Hawaii have uncovered a glitch in a piece of code that could have yielded incorrect results in over 100 published studies that cited the original paper.
The glitch caused results of a common chemistry computation to vary depending on the operating system used, causing discrepancies among Mac, Windows, and Linux systems. The researchers describe their discovery and publish a debugged version of the script, which amounts to roughly 1,000 lines of code, in "Characterization of Leptazolines A-D, Polar Oxazolines from the Cyanobacterium Leptolyngbya sp., Reveals a Glitch with the 'Willoughby-Hoye' Scripts for Calculating NMR Chemical Shifts," published in the journal Organic Letters.
"This simple glitch in the original script calls into question the conclusions of a significant number of papers on a wide range of topics in a way that cannot be easily resolved from published information because the operating system is rarely mentioned," the paper states. "Authors who used these scripts should certainly double-check their results and any relevant conclusions using the modified scripts in the [supplementary information]."
Yuheng Luo, a graduate student at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, discovered the glitch this summer when he was verifying the results of research conducted by chemistry professor Philip Williams on cyanobacteria. Luo used a script written in Python that was published as part of a 2014 paper in the journal Nature Protocols.
It is unclear how many papers this glitch may have affected. According to metrics from Nature Protocols, the 2014 paper has been accessed nearly 1,900 times and cited in 158 other studies.
From Vice
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