If you are in charge of any kind of scientific research, whether that’s for a business or in any other setting, you’ll obviously be keen to make sure that it is being approached as strongly as possible, and that the research is going to be successful. For that, you’ll want to know what you can do to make your scientific research truly strong, which may be more difficult than you think but can also be made quite simple with the right approach.
In this post, we’ll look into what ingredients you might need to bring on board to ensure that your scientific research is going to be strong, so that you can get the purest and most reliable results possible. All of the following are going to be really helpful for you to bear in mind as you proceed through your research, whatever field you may be working in.
A Clear & Testable Question
First off, you can’t really carry out any kind of research without a question to answer – and good science starts off with a well-defined question. Vague curiosity is one thing – and that’s okay for when you are brainstorming and so on – but if you really want to make your research as strong as possible, then you need to ensure that you are narrowing that curiosity into something that is specifically testable.
So coming up with a research question that is specific and measurable is something that you should do at the very start. It may be that it is provided for you, depending on the nature of your situation, but if not, you’ll have to be able to lead to falsifiable predictions based on the questions you can come up with.
Solid Methodology
The methodology is the way in which you test your question, and one of the most important things in any experiment or research is to ensure that you are working on your methodology as thoroughly as possible. The stronger the methodology is, the more you are going to be able to trust the results. So what is it that leads to strong methodology, and how can you be sure that you are running your research in a way that will yield trustworthy results?
For one thing, you need to have well-chosen controls – those which are relevant and specific to the experiment so you can keep the remit of the experiment as clear as possible. You may also need to include some randomization, as this helps you to avoid bias – which is often unconscious – from affecting the study. You might use blinding, if applicable, for similar reasons. The famous double blind approach is not always necessary, but there are certainly a lot of times when it can be beneficial. And you should make sure that you are using a broad enough pool of participants to draw meaningful conclusions – as it turns out, statistical power really makes a difference.
If you have these kinds of methods in place, you are going to have much more reliable results, and you’ll be able to find it easier to secure future funding too.
Transparency & Reproducibility
If nobody else is able to reproduce your findings, they might not be legitimate. This is one of the cornerstones of science, and it’s something you are going to have to concern yourself with if you want your research to stand up well. This is one of the main reasons you need to ensure that your research is transparent, so other people are able to try and reproduce it themselves, whether they are doing so now or far into the future.
To that end, strong research is that which describes its methods in detail, shares data and code where that might be applicable, and follows the rules of open science practice – like pre-registration and publishing negative results. The idea is that you are making it as easy as possible for other people to verify your work or challenge it in a fair way. That’s what actually makes it science.
Trusted Materials
To ensure that your study is effective and that it is trustworthy, you also need to take care with the materials you use. They should be of the right quality for the task at hand, and they should be appropriately chosen. You’ll also need to make sure that you are using the right materials, that you know your Streptavidin from your avidin and so on. If you are using materials you can trust, it means that you are able to trust the outcomes of the study a lot more. Whereas, when you are not sure about the quality of the materials, the whole study may be affected by this.
So be careful about where you source your materials, and make sure you feel you can trust them as much as possible.
Ethical Standards
Of course, scientific studies take place in the real world, and real people, animals and other elements of the natural world are affected. As such, you need to make sure that you are sticking to a number of important ethical standards, because there is no study that is worth sacrificing human or animal welfare over. Strong science adheres to a number of guidelines that you need to be aware of.
That includes the fact of informed consent, where each participant in a study has to actively give consent to be part of it. You also need to show respect for their privacy, and ensure that you are doing everything you can to keep their sensitive data protected. And if you are using animals, you have to show that you have used them in a humane manner. Unethical research will usually get thrown out, so you need to make sure that you are avoiding these kinds of errors.
As you can see, there are a lot of factors that you need to be aware of if you want to make sure that your scientific research is as strong as possible. With these things in place, you can be sure of that.