A perspective on the reliability and relevance of research results

Ensuring the quality of research results during the preparation and publication of a scientific article is a multi-stage, iterative process that depends on numerous people and additional factors (Faggion 2016 ). The main people involved are the authors, reviewers and editors, each of whom may have individual and personal motivations that affect the quality of the article and its assessment. However, a common criterion defining high-quality research is the reliability of the data. According to a proposition by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), reliability includes repeatability (same persons, same equipment), replicability (different persons, same equipment) and reproducibility (different persons, different equipment) (Plesser 2017 ). Likewise, the relevance of data is an important measure that leads to fundamental understanding and advances technologies to real-world applications. Whereas the latter can be difficult to measure, relevance may be assessed by metrics quantifying the impact of the publishing journal, or probably better, the number of times the publication is cited (Aksnes und Langfeldt 2025 ).