Reporting Results in High Energy Physics Papers: a Manifesto
(2019)cite arxiv:1904.11718Comment: 10 pages, 0 figures. Inspired by the preparation of a talk at SM@LCH 2019, Zürich.Zusammenfassung
The complexity of collider data analyses has dramatically increased from
early colliders to the LHC. Reconstruction of physics objects has reached a
point that requires dedicated papers documenting the techniques, and periodic
retuning of the algorithms themselves. Analysis methods evolved to account for
the increased complexity of the final states sought and for the need of
squeezing the last bit of sensitivity from the data; they often involve a full
final state reconstruction---mostly relatively easy at lepton colliders,
sometimes exceedingly difficult at hadron colliders---or the use of advanced
statistical techniques such as statistical learning. The need of keeping the
papers documenting results to a reasonable size implies nowadays a greater
level of compression or even omission of information with respect to papers
from twenty years ago. The need for compression should however not prevent
sharing a reasonable amount of information that is essential to understanding a
given analysis. Infrastructures like RIVET or HepData have been developed to
host additional material, but the amount of material which is sent to these
databases is still often insufficient. In this Letter I advocate for an
increase in the information shared by the Collaborations, and try to define a
minimum standard for acceptable level of information when reporting statistical
procedures in High Energy Physics papers.
Beschreibung
Reporting Results in High Energy Physics Papers: a Manifesto