[FieldTrip] Is FieldTrip valid? A reviewer doubts it...

[Robert Oostenveld]

Hi Davide,

Ideally reviewers have expertise in all aspects of the paper that they review. But reviewers are not all-knowledgeable and hence it shoudl not come as a surprise that a reviewer might not be able to properly assess certain aspects of the study.

I don’t know how you referred to the software that you used in your analysis, but presume that you cited the FieldTrip reference paper. In the response to the reviewer you could furthermore point out http://fieldtrip.fcdonders.nl/publications. Note that I still should update it for 2014. Alternatively, you could point to http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=5316958122258245287&scisbd=1 which automatically lists all papers that have cited our reference paper. You might also point out that Joaching Gross (who should be considered “the" authority on DICS) is using the same FieldTrip software himself. 

Showing these citations of scientific papers prior to yours that have relied on the FieldTrip software is still no argument for it being “validated software”. But I hope that it raises the confidence of the reviewer that the software you used is not the result of a toy project. Formally validated software is in general difficult to come by, and I would actually be curious as to which software packages the reviewer considers as “validated" for MEG analysis.

cheers
Robert


On 08 Jan 2015, at 13:26, Davide Rivolta <drivolta81 at gmail.com> wrote:

> 
> Dear all,
> 
> I have recently used FT (and DICS in particular) for the analysis of a pharmaco-MEG study.
> 
> One of the reviewers of our submitted manuscript is not fully convinced about FT. Here is his comment: 
> 
> "More details regarding what software was used to implement the beamforrmer is important to properly assess the validity of the results. It does not appear that the authors used currently available validated software to perform this analysis". 
> 
> What would your reply? 
> I expect angry emails from you  : )
> 
> 
> Bests,
> Davide
> 
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