>I do not see what harm there is reporting Rmerge, even if it is just used in >the inner shell or just used to capture a flavour of the data set overall. I >also appreciate that Rmeas converges to the same value for large multiplicity
Consider a callow young grad student, David, who being beleaguered by his distant advisor and armchair crystallographer, Dr. Murdstone, into improving the statistics of his data, resorts to every option, including trying to collect a high-multiplicity data set (100-fold!). To his chagrin, Rmerge keeps rising even in spite of these heroic efforts. His exceedingly humble post-doc friend and confidant, Uriah, pecks out with his clammy hands a script for improving Rmerge, to which he subjects David’s, and indeed all of the lab’s, data. Cheers resound at the improved statistics (and smaller mtz files), especially from Murdstone, although only MR seems to work now for solving structures, and final model stats generally worsen. With the help of some other corrective scripts written by Uriah based on Murthy’s Law, there is a lovely spate of papers published at well-known journals, and Dr. Murdstone becomes Sir Murdstone. Unfortunately, David’s data set requires experimental phasing, so he remains in a tailspin with progressively nastier emails arriving from Murdstone daily. Observing the situation, the reticent lab manager Agnes opens up the merging code, and deletes all mention of Rmerge. Uriah’s great successes suddenly stop, but somehow David is now able to solve his data set, and he marries Agnes, while all of the recent MR-based structures are retracted, notwithstanding the hundreds of subsequent papers based on their conclusions. David becomes a noted crystallographer with Agnes helping him slightly in the background, while humble Uriah finally finds useful and vastly remunerative employment in a pharma marketing and lobbying firm in the New World. Is this happening right now somewhere? O Britannia, reck ye the perils of Rmerge.
