Fig. 1

All research in wet- and dry-lab biology use computational methods that examine strength of evidence [24]. Everybody starts from the lab with original data generation or data collection, and it only diverges when we try to analyse and make inferences. We argue that ‘computational validation’ is undertaken in all experimental and computational studies. For instance, replication of experiments in a case-control setting is in itself inherently a computational validation since we compare mean ± SD or any other computationally-derived summary metric between cases and controls to distinguish signal from noise. Therefore, ‘computational validation’ is a term that should be publicised along with ‘experimental validation’, to scientifically reproduce findings from experimental as well as computational biology. Illustration by Ricky Castillo