Re: Research survey: Impact of Microsoft Acquisition of GitHub
Asavaseri Natnaree writes ("Re: Research survey: Impact of Microsoft Acquisition of GitHub"):
> I am happy to announce that we are ready to release preliminary results of the "Developer Perception to Microsoft's acquisition of GitHub" survey. These results can be accessed at " https://naist-se.github.io/study-of-microsofts-github-acquisition/";. Again thank you for your participation and please feel free to share or discuss these results.
I'm sorry to say that I think this is a poor piece of work.
1. Your output is not presented as a proper research paper. That
makes it hard to navigate, assess, reference, etc.
2. Your publication does not address weaknesses in participant
recruitment which were made known to you explicitly during the
participant recruitment process.
2a. Specifically, your requirements for participants were incompatible
with the views of many developers whose opinions you were nominally
soliciting. As a result, your dataset is biased.
2b. Additionally, your recruitment process was regarded by some
potential participatns as spam. This would also expected to be
correlated with opinions about Microsoft.
3. I can find no evidence or discussion of your ethics board approval.
I think presenting your results in this inappropriate form. without
the appropriate caveats, is arguably academic malpractice. Conducting
research on human subjects, even if only questionnaires, normally
requires ethics approval.
To debian-devel: Does someone here speak enough Japanese to find the
contact email address for someone at NAIST who will take reports of
potential problems with research ethics ?
Ian.
--
Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk> These opinions are my own.
If I emailed you from an address @fyvzl.net or @evade.org.uk, that is
a private address which bypasses my fierce spamfilter.
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