Saturday, April 5, 2014

If you only read ONE paper this year...

...make it this paper:

Osborne JM, Bernabeu MO, Bruna M, Calderhead B, Cooper J, et al. (2014) Ten Simple Rules for Effective Computational Research. PLoS Comput Biol, 10(3): e1003506. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003506

INCLUDING the supporting information text, which is very detailed and provides a fantastic trove of resources explaining how to get started.

As someone who has moved from lab-based biology towards computational research, I can tell you that I've learned many of these lessons the hard way. I wish someone had handed me this paper four years ago when started transitioning fields during my first postdoc. For biologists, this paper provides great advice for how to a) make computational tasks less painful, b) work with computer scientists and bioinformaticians, and c) how to do better science. If you don't think you need to learn GitHub, that you can get by without it...sure, you can, but you'll probably end up there anyway. And then you'll discover how much easier and efficient your research will become:



1 comment:



  1. What an awesome post, I just read it from start to end. Learned something new after a long time.

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