Title
The Truth, The Whole Truth, and Nothing But the Truth: A Pragmatic Guide to Assessing Empirical Evaluations.
Abstract
An unsound claim can misdirect a field, encouraging the pursuit of unworthy ideas and the abandonment of promising ideas. An inadequate description of a claim can make it difficult to reason about the claim, for example, to determine whether the claim is sound. Many practitioners will acknowledge the threat of unsound claims or inadequate descriptions of claims to their field. We believe that this situation is exacerbated, and even encouraged, by the lack of a systematic approach to exploring, exposing, and addressing the source of unsound claims and poor exposition. This article proposes a framework that identifies three sins of reasoning that lead to unsound claims and two sins of exposition that lead to poorly described claims and evaluations. Sins of exposition obfuscate the objective of determining whether or not a claim is sound, while sins of reasoning lead directly to unsound claims. Our framework provides practitioners with a principled way of critiquing the integrity of their own work and the work of others. We hope that this will help individuals conduct better science and encourage a cultural shift in our research community to identify and promulgate sound claims.
Year
DOI
Venue
2016
10.1145/2983574
ACM Trans. Program. Lang. Syst.
Keywords
Field
DocType
Performance evaluation (efficiency and effectiveness),Experimental evaluation,observation study,experimentation
Programming language,Nothing,Computer science,Operations research,Epistemology,Obfuscation,Computer programming
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
38
4
0164-0925
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
4
0.47
13
Authors
19
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Stephen M. Blackburn1106764.22
Amer Diwan294176.40
Matthias Hauswirth331734.96
Peter F. Sweeney474269.82
José Nelson Amaral543640.18
Tim Brecht652649.87
Lubomír Bulej716520.20
Cliff Click840.47
Lieven Eeckhout92863195.11
Sebastian Fischmeister1040952.75
Daniel Frampton1126112.73
Laurie Jane Hendren122617199.08
Michael Hind131680123.18
Antony Hosking1430618.20
Richard E. Jones1518713.99
Tomas Kalibera1632823.15
Nathan Keynes17754.79
Nathaniel Nystrom1848335.19
Andreas Zeller195697303.71