Question: What are the five fundamentally important things you need to remember when being a scientist?

Rebecca Dewey answered on 16 Jun 2015:

I’m not sure there is an official list! This is my list:

1. Enthusiasm. You need to be passionate about your science. If you don’t care or you’re not interested, you won’t do anywhere near as good a job. It’s really important that you don’t get bored or stagnate in the same job too long because things just get stale and you make mistakes / do bad science.

2. Ethics. Working with humans I need to think about ethics all the time, but people who work with machines or data still need to think about ethics. I need to make sure that everything I do is safe and socially acceptable. I need to make sure that people can take part in my research and be confident that I will keep their data anonymous or confidential and that I will only use their data for what I have said I will and what they have agreed to. Thankfully, we have research ethics committees and a national research ethics service (NRES) to help with this.

3. Verifiability. I can’t just make data up because I want the results to look a certain way. Equally, if I lose some data or miss the chance to get it, I can’t just guess what it would be. It needs to be real science. Even if it doesn’t make a pretty graph.

4. Attribution. If someone else has a good idea or finds a cool thing, it is theirs. If they publish it I can then reference their work and say why I think their idea is good or bad or why I think my idea is different or better or builds on their idea. But their idea was their idea. They need the credit for that. Taking someone else’s idea and pretending it is yours is called plagiarism.

5. Do other stuff. You can’t spend 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, doing science. If you try you will go mad. You need to eat, sleep, walk, talk laugh, play with your kids/friends/family, watch telly, read a book. Science is great but you need to know when to take a break!