The reverberation of implementation errors in a neuroimaging meta-analytic software package: A citation analysis to a technical report on GingerALE

Abstract

GingerALE, a widely used neuroimaging meta-analysis software package, contained errors in earlier versions that were later corrected. The technical report “Implementation errors in the GingerALE Software: description and recommendations” by Eickhoff et al. (2017) documented these errors and their corresponding fixes. In the current study, the papers that cited the GingerALE technical report were analyzed to identify the reasons for these citations. In August 2023, a search through Web of Science Core Collection identified 158 papers that cited the GingerALE technical report. These papers were manually examined to extract the citation statements and code the citation reasons into 12 categories. The analysis revealed that the most frequent reason for citing the report was to justify the use of a specific statistical threshold, followed by a simple acknowledgement of using GingerALE, acknowledging the impact of the errors in earlier versions of GingerALE on prior studies or the lack of effect on current results, and justifying the number of experiments in a meta-analysis. A small number of reasons related to non-GingerALE software, matters not related to activation likelihood estimation (ALE), or statements not mentioned in the GingerALE technical report.