{ "version": "https://jsonfeed.org/version/1.1", "title": "chem-bla-ics", "description": "Chemblaics (pronounced chem-bla-ics) is the science that uses open science and computers to solve problems in chemistry, biochemistry and related fields.", "home_page_url": "https://chem-bla-ics.linkedchemistry.info/", "feed_url": "https://chem-bla-ics.linkedchemistry.info/2008/06/03/good-scientists-pimp-there-research-was.json", "icon": "https://chem-bla-ics.linkedchemistry.info/assets/images/chem-bla-ics_logo.png", "language": "en", "authors": [ { "name": "Egon Willighagen", "url": "https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7542-0286", "_orcid": "0000-0001-7542-0286" } ], "items": [ { "id": "https://doi.org/10.59350/r5p0q-bb580", "url": "https://chem-bla-ics.linkedchemistry.info/2008/06/03/good-scientists-pimp-there-research-was.html", "title": "Good Scientists Pimp there Research (was: Damn, I'm boring...)", "content_html": "

Define good. Let me say that up front. Good scientists, that is, if you say successful researchers are good scientists, secure\ngood funding. Getting good funding requires doing the most relevant research (define relevant). Or, to put it bluntly, being a\nsuccessful researcher requires to pimp your research. Doing boring research is nice for you, good for a Nobel prize if it\nturns out to have a cool spin off, but doesn’t buy you research success.

\n\n

And, boy, am I boring or what?\nReally, Peter is right… I am boring. He is also right that doing quality control doesn’t result in research output. He writes:

\n\n
\n

But it’s essential for modern knowledge-driven science. The chemical software and data industry has no tradition of quality.\nI’ve known it for 30 years and I’ve never seen a commercial company output quality metrics. I have never seen a commercial\ncompany publish results of roundtripping. That’s another really boring and apparently pointless operation where you take a\nfile A, convert it to B and then convert it back to A’. What’s the point? Well A and A’ should be the same. With most\ncommercial software you get loss. If you are lucky it’s only whitespace. But it’s more likely to be hydrogens or charges\nor whatever.

\n
\n\n

There is a huge gap between should and is. This is partly caused that it is much easier to throw garbage at some piece of\ncode, than to start an Ugi reaction on something which is\nnaturally broken. Take a moment to think about that. Garbage in, garbage out is still common in information technology,\nbut I have never heard of the saying oil in, oil out.

\n\n

Scientists do not have the ability to recognize garbage (when it comes to data)! It’s statistics, that other boring\nstuff I do. Even worse, it’s the programmers fault if someone throws garbage at my software and it doesn’t return 42.

\n\n

Unit testing is a poor mans approach to handle garbage. As are diagnostics tools, like\nfinding the difference between IChemObjects \n(and #2 ). Unit tests define common\ngarbage in (of course, also valid input in, but that does not make it less boring) and tests that the method does\nnot freak out; that the tested method gives the user some friendly message like\n“Hi there! I’m your friendly computer program. I am sorry to inform you that it’s garbage you just passed along. Please clean it up first.”

\n\n

Anyway, back to my boring research…

", "summary": "Define good. Let me say that up front. Good scientists, that is, if you say successful researchers are good scientists, secure good funding. Getting good funding requires doing the most relevant research (define relevant). Or, to put it bluntly, being a successful researcher requires to pimp your research. Doing boring research is nice for you, good for a Nobel prize if it turns out to have a cool spin off, but doesn’t buy you research success.", "date_published": "2008-06-03T00:10:00+00:00", "date_modified": "2025-10-11T00:00:00+00:00", "tags": ["chemistry"], "authors": [ { "name": "Egon Willighagen", "url": "https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7542-0286" } ] } ] }