Reporting Results in High Energy Physics Papers: a Manifesto
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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.
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