Reflecting on Research Practices
Victor Le Pochat
Presented at Communications of the ACM (CACM 2024)
There are growing concerns about the quality, reliability, and repeatability of research results, across the broader computing community and more specifically in cyber security as well. In this Communications Security column, I highlight the need and value of studying research practices themselves—also called meta-research—to address those concerns. Meta-research contributes to improving the research process and supporting researchers in preserving the soundness and validity of their research. I will show how the security research community has already made good progress in engaging in such introspection, especially regarding its methods. Nevertheless, we should continue to expand these efforts to the whole research cycle, to further improve our research practices and ensure we can trust scientific findings to be reliable and reproducible.
DOI: 10.1145/3651965
BibTeX:
@article{LePochat2024ResearchPractices,
author = {Le Pochat, Victor},
title = {Reflecting on Research Practices},
journal = {Communications of the ACM},
volume = 67,
number = 5,
pages = {37--39},
month = 5,
year = 2024,
doi = {10.1145/3651965}
}