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Asked by ciaramcgreevy to Daniela, Hannah, Ian, Jono, Mark on 20 Jun 2013.
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Mark Hodson answered on 20 Jun 2013:
Hi ciaramcgreevy,
often it’s the other way around – there is so much information out there that it can be hard to read it all and assess what is useful and what isn’t.
There are various specialist search engines that scientists can use to find information and we also go to conferences and talk to each other. Conferences in particular are great for finding out what colleagues are doing. They are also lots of fun and good for travelling
cheers
m
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Daniela Plana answered on 20 Jun 2013:
Hi ciaramcgreevy t,
That’s a good question… as scientists we do spend a lot of time finding out as much information as we can about what has been done before and what is currently being done that has to do with our research. Sometimes there’s very little information and sometimes there’s so much that you have to read quite a bit!
There are some good websites that help us do that now, but before you had to to the library a lot and in many cases try to contact the people who were working on similar things directly. It must have been really hard before computers and internet!
Hope that helps!
Daniela -
Jono Bone answered on 20 Jun 2013:
Hi,
A lot of people work on similar questions to me but come from very different fields. For example evolutionary biologists, economists, psychologists social scientists and anthropologists are all interested in human social behaviour. The problem is finding the research that’s good and trying to understand other peoples work even if they come from a different discipline to me and as a result are interested in slightly different questions and use different methods.
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Ian Wilson answered on 21 Jun 2013:
Hi Ciara,
It can be tricky sometimes, yes. There are loads of search engines out there that we can use to find research papers – Scopus, Web of Knowledge, Google Scholar… – but it’s not always easy to find what you need. The species I work on, Entamoeba histolytica, isn’t studied by many people really. Especially when you compare it with the number of people who work on, say, malaria! That means that there aren’t always many (or any!) research articles that support my work.
What we can do in those situations, is find a similar piece of research carried out using a similar organism. A lot of the time, a piece of research that applies to one organism might apply to a closely related one too. You need to make sure that people know that’s not definite, but it makes your results and discussion seem more trustworthy!
Cheers,
Ian
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Hannah Brotherton answered on 21 Jun 2013:
Hi ciaramcgreevy,
Absolutely, if your doing something no one else has ever done before. But many scientists will carry on research from others, so there is work out there already that they can back up their study.As the world gets bigger and more scientists are experimenting, more and more information will become available to use in our research. More scientists, mean more findings, which means more answers and breakthroughs can be found. …..But, there is still some work in the world that has little information and facts to back it up. It is a completely new study.
Right now, I am looking at something not many people have looked at, so I have to interpret other peoples studies and try to relate it mine. I have to read outside the box, which is very very difficult. There are a lot of questions and few answers, but it is my job to find the answer using my experiments. Then one day someone can use my work to back up their research 😀
But…..I can find some of the information using Google scholar (a posh Google for scientist :), and things called search engines which just let us type in a word and every research paper in the world with the word in it pops up.
You will get to use these when you come to university 😀 even for degrees that are not science related like law or history. There are research papers for every subject in the world.
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