Ask HN: Should I publish my research code?

But to be honest, I am truly underwhelmed by the response. For several papers I created Jupyter notebooks that reproduce every single figure in the paper. It has been a huge amount of work. But in spite that the papers with code are reasonably often cited, I’ve been getting only minimal feedback.

So it‘s really difficult to judge whether the effort of properly preparing the code is worth the effort.

On the other hand I have run into several papers that turned out to be not reproducible without the code. Chances are that these particular papers would not have been reproducible with the code, too :D (there were just too many things not adding up). But it would have saved us a lot of time if the code would have been available.

Tl;dr: make the code available, but don‘t invest too much time in polishing it. Hardly anyone is going to thank you.

One exception: if you want to impress future employers, polishing code is worth it. A good portfolio on GitHub can open doors.

As an outsider with occasional glimpses into academia, I've observed a bimodal response:

On the one hand, code seems to be seen as more available for reuse in terms of copy-and-paste, particularly in the exploratory phase.

On the other hand, code reuse is somewhat less likely to trigger an acknowledgement and citation.

This unacknowledged copy-and-paste borrowing of code seems in turn to be one influential factor inhibiting the derived code from being shared in turn.

> May have to make it very explicit.

That certainly can't hurt. I've certainly seen that reusable tools aren't cited as often as they are used, which in turn inhibits efforts from being made by academics in the production and refinement of such tools (the citation being the primary currency and reward mechanism for publication in academia).

Explicitly asking for citations (and getting them) helps with that, though the more general issue of "releasing open source software isn't seen as 'publication' for academic status purposes such as being considered for tenure" remains a problem, though it varies considerably by field, institution, and department.

But if given some thought and extra effort, a researcher might actually get more papers (possibly with different sets of collaborators) out of roughly the same body of work, especially if they look more broadly for appropriate conferences and journals.

BTW, again as an outsider with occasional glimpses into academia, it seems to me that there are many vacant niches for cross-disciplinary journals and conferences focused on reusable assets such as datasets and tools necessary for research.

Science progresses by criticism, after all.

2. push it there