Quantum

Works on My QPU: Reproducibility in Quantum Computing Research

Dominik Köster, Maja Franz, Benjamin Zec, Nicole Hoess, Ralf Ramsauer, Wolfgang Mauerer

Featured July 12, 2026

This analysis was generated by SciGrove. Upload your own PDFs or enter a DOI — and get the same AI breakdown on any paper.

Get started

AI-generated analysis — This is SciGrove's AI interpretation of the paper, not peer-reviewed content. Always refer to the original paper.

Simply

Many quantum computing research papers share code, but most of it doesn't actually run because the authors don't fully explain all the software setup needed, leading to broken experiments.

In depth

The paper conducts a large-scale empirical study revealing a significant reproducibility crisis in quantum computing research, where most published code artifacts fail to execute. The authors identify that incomplete environment specifications and implicit assumptions are the primary causes, rather than just code absence. They advocate for declarative environment management tools like Nix to explicitly define and maintain reproducible execution contexts.

Key Takeaways

1
Only about one-quarter of quantum computing (QC) papers provide accessible code artifacts.
2
A substantial majority (64.5%) of available QC code fails to execute successfully in a clean environment.
3
The core issue is incomplete or implicit environment specifications, which can be mitigated by declarative environment management tools.

Conceptual Flow

HIGH LEVEL

Methodology: How Reproducibility Was Studied

Researchers checked many papers to see if their computer code could be run by others, like trying to follow a recipe without all the ingredients listed.

Research Papers

Reproducibility Rules

Check & Test

Reproducibility Score

Failure Reasons

Results: What They Found and Proposed

They found most code didn't work because of missing setup details, so they suggested better tools to clearly list everything needed.

Broken Experiments

Hidden Setup

Suggest Better Tools

Reliable Code

Clear Instructions