Exploratory data analysis of the EXFOR database

The EXFOR database is a large collection of experimental nuclear reaction data for incident neutrons, charged particles and photons. The EXchange FORmat was designed to be very flexible in order to be able to store the data as published. However, this flexibility is a drawback for systematic comparison of EXFOR data with evaluated data or nuclear reaction code results. The WPEC Subgroup 30 on "Improvement of Accessibility and Quality of the EXFOR Database" was founded with the aims to establish EXFOR as a more easily accessible and reliable database. In this framework, a directory-structured database was created in simple tabular format. The content of this database was verified with various statistical tests and compared with default results from the TALYS code. This work allowed various problems to be identified, either in the EXFOR translating codes or in the EXFOR database, and sometimes in the original publications.