On Mon, Apr 30, 2012 at 2:17 PM, Pavel Afonine
Sure, but then at least one needs to clearly define what exactly is "Outer shell" and "highest resolution shell". I can come up with gazillions ways of defining the "highest resolution shell" and depending on how I define it the numbers will be vastly different.
This is true in theory, but in practice the most common convention by far is to divide the possible reflections into 10 bins. Whether this number is optimally chosen or not is largely irrelevant; most programs (for data processing, or further downstream) report something like this, and experienced crystallographers have some idea how to interpret such values when they see them. Reporting individual statistics for each bin would indeed more information at the expense of legibility - as I keep saying, humans are not text parsers. (Besides which, the "Table 1" program in Phenix does in fact report the actual resolution range for the outer bin.) -Nat