Quentin PETITJEAN: The SORTEE Guidelines for Data and Code Quality Control

Quentin PETITJEAN

I’m happy to have contributed to The SORTEE Guidelines for Data and Code Quality Control in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, a community effort to make data and code checks clearer, more consistent, and more transparent across journals in ecology and evolution.

The guidelines

These guidelines offer the first standardized framework for Data and Code Quality Control led by SORTEE members and data editors across journals in ecology and evolution. The article introduces what data editors do, why quality control matters and provides a transparent, step-by-step process for checking archived data and code alongside manuscripts. Aimed at journal editors, reviewers, and authors, it outlines expected benefits and costs and gives practical advice for adoption. As a complement to peer review, it helps ensure that shared data and code adhere to the FAIR principles—Findable · Accessible · Interoperable · Reusable—at publication.

Check the preprint (DOI: 10.32942/X24P8S)

SORTEE in a nutshell

SORTEE—the Society for Open, Reliable, and Transparent Ecology and Evolutionary Biology—is an international, volunteer-driven community working to improve research reliability and transparency through cultural and institutional change. Activities include producing open-science resources (e.g., the above-mentioned guidelines), hosting webinars and annual unconferences/hackathons, and running the field-specific preprint server EcoEvoRxiv.

Want a quick tour of SORTEE’s mission and outputs?

Want to know more about SORTEE?

Check the SORTEE website for news, events, and ways to get involved. You can also follow announcements on social media and in the newsletter.

Corrections

If you see mistakes or want to suggest changes, please create an issue on the source repository.

Reuse

Text and figures are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution CC BY-SA 4.0. Source code is available at https://github.com/qpetitjean/qpetitjean_distill, unless otherwise noted. The figures that have been reused from other sources don't fall under this license and can be recognized by a note in their caption: "Figure from ...".

Citation

For attribution, please cite this work as

PETITJEAN (2025, Oct. 24). Quentin PETITJEAN: The SORTEE Guidelines for Data and Code Quality Control. Retrieved from https://qpetitjean.github.io/qpetitjean_distill/posts/2025-10-24-data-editor-guidelines/

BibTeX citation

@misc{petitjean2025the,
  author = {PETITJEAN, Quentin},
  title = {Quentin PETITJEAN: The SORTEE Guidelines for Data and Code Quality Control},
  url = {https://qpetitjean.github.io/qpetitjean_distill/posts/2025-10-24-data-editor-guidelines/},
  year = {2025}
}