Question: What sources do you use for your research?

Zoe Vance answered on 18 Mar 2025:

Mostly a combination of existing research that’s been peer-reviewed and then my own findings based on directly analysing data.

A peer-reviewed article has been submitted to a scientific journal that has then sent it out to a few other scientists who review it and report back on any issues or comments they have with the work. An editor then looks at these reviews and decided whether the article is going to be rejected (too much wrong with it to publish) or if the authors can make changes and send it back in to be reviewed again. It can take a few rounds of reviews for work to be published in a journal so the idea is we can be really sure that the results are correct by the end.

The process can take quite a while though which delays results getting out, and sometimes results also end up not being published just because they aren’t very exciting – an article that shows that some chemical *does* cause cancer is much more likely to get published than one that shows it doesn’t. This can be a problem because then if someone was to search and see if that chemical causes cancer it would look like no-one had ever checked and they would go and test it again – a waste! So we will also read results from articles called ‘preprints’ that haven’t gone through the whole traditional peer-review process yet because these will often have very recent results and less of a bias in what gets published.