• Question: Does anyone mark or check your work and of so who?

    Asked by anon-224934 to Simon, Selen, Paul, Nawapat, Natalie, Katy on 16 Nov 2019.
    • Photo: Paul Laurance-Young

      Paul Laurance-Young answered on 16 Nov 2019:

      In science you have something called “peer review”; This is where your research is checked by other scientists, usually leaders in their field, before it is published. They will ask questions about it: what are you trying to answer, have you actually answered your question, is the answer correct based on your experiment, have you read around the existing information enough, is this ethical, has your experiment worked, have you analysed the data correctly?
      Some researchers don’t do this but very well, because no one likes to have their work torn to tiny pieces, but it is a very important step. Sadly there is a LOT of rubbish published in journals from scientists who didn’t want to do this step.

    • Photo: Nawapat Kaweeyanun

      Nawapat Kaweeyanun answered on 16 Nov 2019:

      Paul has given a very good description of the peer reviewing, which is the biggest test we can have as scientists. But even before peer-review, my work goes through checks by scientists I work with. This is what we call “group research”. Often, I won’t have the equipment that I need, or I need special knowledge that I have not learn yet. So instead of spending a lot of time learning/building things, I work as a team with other scientists and we “co-author” the paper(s) we publish. My ideas and thoughts are discussed within our team, providing checks that I am not going off track. This is how research is usually done in the scientific world today, especially given how large our projects have become (e.g. measuring gravitational wave or taking picture of a black hole)!

    • Photo: Natalie Fowler

      Natalie Fowler answered on 18 Nov 2019:

      I work in a team of 10 scientists and although we don’t have anybody who comes to mark our work, we are all there to help. It’s very common for us to ask our colleagues to check something just to see if they would do it the same way. Like Paul said, we also have research that is peer reviewed by scientists from different areas.

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