van Heerden, E.Karastergiou, A.Roberts, J.2017-05-242017-05-242016van Heerden, E. et al. (2016). A framework for assessing the performance of pulsar search pipelines. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 467(2): 1661-16770035-8711http://hdl.handle.net/10566/2874https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stw3068In this paper, we present a framework for assessing the effect of non-stationary Gaussian noise and radio frequency interference (RFI) on the signal to noise ratio, the number of false positives detected per true positive and the sensitivity of standard pulsar search pipelines. The results highlight the necessity to develop algorithms that are able to identify and remove non-stationary variations from the data before RFI excision and searching is performed in order to limit false positive detections. The results also show that the spectrum whitening algorithms currently employed, severely affect the effciency of pulsar search pipelines by reducing their sensitivity to long period pulsars.enThis is a pre-copyedited, author-produced PDF of an article accepted for publication in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society following peer review. The version of record van Heerden, E. et al. (2016). A framework for assessing the performance of pulsar search pipelines. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 467(2): 1661-1677 is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stw3068AnalyticalData analysisStatisticalStarsPulsarsGeneral.Article