Could a journal reject an article due to the style or quality of accompanying code? I'm a student working on a doctoral thesis. We're working on a paper for which I've done most of the coding for the statistical analysis (the field is microbio/bioinformatics). I'm new to coding and the whole thing is more of an add on to my &quot;real&quot; career, which is medicine. Therefore, my style of coding is more than basic I'd say. Now I fear if we're handing in the manuscript plus the code to a journal for peer review it will be rejected or ridiculed. Is this possible?
edit: I use R to conduct a large statistical analysis. If someone would like to point out online learning resources, esp. for the fields of medicine/biology, I'd be very grateful.
You will not have a paper rejected for poor coding style. Particularly not in bioinformatics. Unless the paper is a tool development paper, the chance that a reviewer even looks at the code is not that high, and if they do, it will just be to check that its reasonable. In the outside case a reviewer might spot a bug, or poor assumption that actaully makes the result wrong, but they will not reject you for poor style.
However, having the code associated with the paper massively increases the chances that it will be useful to someone else.