• Question: What do other scientists think of your work?

    Asked by pacy520gaed on 28 Apr 2025.
    • Photo: Martin McCoustra

      Martin McCoustra answered on 28 Apr 2025:

      An interesting question… One way you can find that out is to look at whether or not other scientists refer to your work when they report their own. I’m pretty lucky that many do!

    • Photo: Luke Fountain

      Luke Fountain answered on 15 May 2025:

      This is a very good question… Science is all about communication. As a scientist, you have to be able to communicate your work, usually through writing scientific papers and presenting talks at conferences, to show scientists (and others) why your work is important. Writing proposals for new ideas is sometimes even more important so that we can secure funding to carry out further research – it is really important here to stress why our work is important.

      When writing papers and proposals, we often go through a process called peer review, where other scientists in our field read our work and provide feedback to ensure that it is valid and we have taken the right approach – sometimes there is not much to say, and at other times, reviewers have LOTS to say about your work, but it depends. Overall though, this makes the quality of the science that is carried out and published better.

      Conferences are another great place for scientists to talk about their work, and in my field at least, most scientists are very supportive of my work and that of others in the field – we are all excited about the field, and any science that moves it forward is worth discussing.

    • Photo: Ioanna Bezirtzoglou

      Ioanna Bezirtzoglou answered on 19 May 2025:

      I have never thought of this question previously to be honest – but I believe I am working on research that has medical relevance to improve people’s wellbeing – hence they would be appreciative/collaborative 🙂

Comments

  • Photo: melissau

    melissau commented on :

    As Luke has said, for scientists there is a process called peer review which means that when we’ve completed a project and want to share our findings with other scientists we describe it in a paper for publication in a scientific journal – before it can be published the paper is sent to other scientists who work on the same subject and they ask questions about the work we’ve done to check that the research has been done well and the findings and recommendations we’re making are sensible. This review process can take a long time (several months is not uncommon) so we have to be patient but it generally means that only ‘good’ science is shared with the wider world. As an experienced scientist you may be asked to review other scientists’ papers too, which means you have to ask the same kind of questions to understand their work and to determine whether it’s good enough to be published. Sometimes, a newspaper or even TV journalist may be interested in talking about new research, to share it more widely, with people who aren’t scientists but who may find it interesting or useful to learn about – in this case, the way it’s communicated is likely to be different from the scientific paper as it needs to be described in less technical language.