# Check an existing analysis: limits and conditions

> What can be established about past work, what cannot be recovered, and how limited results should be read.

Existing analyses: limits and conditions.

## What cannot be recovered

- **Pre-registration.** Registering a plan now does not show that it was specified before the data. Missing history stays missing.
- **The original program.** Agreement with today’s recomputation does not prove that the original software produced the reported values in the same way.
- **Unknown preprocessing.** Undocumented preprocessing is not reconstructed.

## What it does not do

- **No code execution.** Existing scripts are read to propose settings; they are not executed, and their correctness is not certified.
- **No extraction from PDFs or images.** Data are not extracted from arbitrary PDFs or images.
- **No method changes to make it pass.** Methods are not changed automatically until a guarantee becomes available.

## Scope and reading limited results

- **Supported workflows only.** Past analyses are recomputed only within the supported workflows. Without the original data, only a limited comparison of reported results is possible.
- **Limited is not complete.** A limited result states what holds and what does not. It is not a confirmatory claim or a full-chain guarantee.
- **Assumptions stay assumptions.** Calculations under assumed conditions are labeled as such and are not presented as confirmed for the real study.

Back to [Check an existing analysis](https://www.licklider.ai/sciground/existing-analysis/).