Communicate the result in scientific method

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By Damon Verial

Invariably, the step that follows an experiment or study that yields a result is to communicate that result. How a scientist chooses to communicate his results depends on many factors. Ultimately, the scientist must decide the end use of his result before deciding on the medium through which to communicate it, whether through scientific journals, presentations at scientific meetings or directly to the public.

Many scientists prefer to communicate their research results through scientific journals. A scientist has many reasons for doing so, including building her reputation as a scientist, benefitting from peer review, and being able to directly present her research to other scientists in her field. Other scientists can easily access most scientific journals in their fields and therefore are likely to refer to results published in these journals while performing their own research. Scientific journals also have something called an impact factor, which represents how often a certain journal is cited by other scientists; this impact factor is often a consideration for many scientists submitting their work to journals. When a scientist submits his research to a scientific journal, his research is not automatically published because other scientists must first review the results. This fact allows for a high level of quality control in scientific journals but also frustrates some scientists whose results aren’t particularly important, such as results that fail to confirm a hypothesis or results of a replicated study.

Scientific meetings allow scientists in specialized fields to come together and discuss, face-to-face, many issues in science. But one primary reason for these meetings is the ability to share research results. Scientists sometimes opt to bring their papers to present at scientific meetings instead of going through scientific journals. This allows scientists to present the most up-to-date findings, something often impossible to do with scientific journals because of the time needed for peer review, revisions and publication. In addition, presenting a finding through a presentation allows a scientist to gather immediate feedback.

Sometimes the results of a scientists’ research might have implications for policy or individual behavior. Sciences such as public health and psychology often produce results that would prove helpful to society as a whole, not just the scientific community. In cases such as these, a scientist might decide to present his findings directly to the public, putting publication on the back burner. When a scientist presents her findings to the public, she tends to go through media that the public, not scientists, use. So while scientific journals tend to be out of the question, they might use newspapers via contacting journalists, the Internet via science websites, or books written for the non-scientist. Through these routes, a scientist ensures that her results will more easily reach the public and be put to use by those who need them.

With all the choices scientists have, the “correct” means of communicating research results is not always apparent. But the good news is scientists are not necessarily limited to a specific communication form. For example, according to the World Health Organization, some scientists will present their papers at scientific meetings as a preliminary step to submitting their papers to scientific journals, allowing the best of both worlds. Often, after the scientific community reviews and confirms results, either through scientific journals or meetings, the responsible scientists will push their results into the public, accepting interviews from journalists or appearing on television shows to talk about their findings. In the end, scientists are not limited to a single type of communication, but, busy as they are, might simply decide to choose the way most in line with their own values, whether it be notoriety in the scientific community or the teaching of their results to the general public.

The scientific method is a process for experimentation that is used to explore observations and answer questions.

Do all scientists follow the scientific method exactly? No. Some areas of science can be more easily tested than others. For example, scientists studying how stars change as they age or how dinosaurs digested their food cannot fast-forward a star's life by a million years or run medical exams on feeding dinosaurs to test their hypotheses. When direct experimentation is not possible, scientists modify the scientific method. But even when modified, the goal (and many of the steps) remains the same: to discover cause and effect relationships by asking questions, carefully gathering and examining the evidence, and seeing if all the available information can be combined into a logical answer. New information or thinking might also cause a scientist to back up and repeat steps at any point during the process. Understanding the steps of the scientific method will help you focus your scientific question and work through your observations and data to answer the question as well as possible.

The interactive diagram below may help you understand the scientific method and how it is applied to an experiment. You can click on parts of the diagram to learn more. Use the "return to top" button

The scientific method starts when you ask a question about something that you observe: How, What, When, Who, Which, Why, or Where?

For a science fair project some teachers require that the question be something you can measure, preferably with a number.

For detailed help with this step, use these resources:

• Your Question
• Laboratory Notebook

A hypothesis is an educated guess about how things work. It is an attempt to answer your question with an explanation that can be tested. A good hypothesis allows you to then make a prediction:
"If _____[I do this] _____, then _____[this]_____ will happen."

State both your hypothesis and the resulting prediction you will be testing. Predictions must be easy to measure.

For detailed help with this step, use these resources:

Your experiment tests whether your prediction is accurate and thus your hypothesis is supported or not. It is important for your experiment to be a fair test. You conduct a fair test by making sure that you change only one factor at a time while keeping all other conditions the same.

You should also repeat your experiments several times to make sure that the first results weren't just an accident.

For detailed help with this step, use these resources:

• Experimental Procedure
• Materials List
• Conducting an Experiment

Once your experiment is complete, you collect your measurements and analyze them to see if they support your hypothesis or not.

Scientists often find that their predictions were not accurate and their hypothesis was not supported, and in such cases they will communicate the results of their experiment and then go back and construct a new hypothesis and prediction based on the information they learned during their experiment. This starts much of the process of the scientific method over again. Even if they find that their hypothesis was supported, they may want to test it again in a new way.

For detailed help with this step, use these resources:

• Data Analysis & Graphs
• Conclusions

To complete your science fair project you will communicate your results to others in a final report and/or a display board. Professional scientists do almost exactly the same thing by publishing their final report in a scientific journal or by presenting their results on a poster or during a talk at a scientific meeting. In a science fair, judges are interested in your findings regardless of whether or not they support your original hypothesis.

For detailed help with this step, use these resources:

• Final Report
• Abstract
• Display Board
• Science Fair Judging

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the six steps of the scientific method?

The six steps of the scientific method include: 1) asking a question about something you observe, 2) doing background research to learn what is already known about the topic, 3) constructing a hypothesis, 4) experimenting to test the hypothesis, 5) analyzing the data from the experiment and drawing conclusions, and 6) communicating the results to others.

What is a scientific method example?

A simple example of the scientific method is:

• Ask a Question: Why does Greenland look so large on a map?
• Background Research: Learn that Greenland is a quarter the size of the United States in land mass. Also learn that Mercator projection maps are made by transferring the images from a sphere to a sheet of paper wrapped around the sphere in a cylinder.
• Hypothesis: If I make a Mercator projection map, then the items in the middle of the map will look their true size and the items at the poles will look larger than they really are.
• Experiment: Use a sphere with 1-inch by 1-inch squares at each pole and the equator to make a Mercator projection map. Measure the squares on the Mercator projection map.
• Analyze Data and Make Conclusions: The middle-of-the-map squares average 1 inch per side while the squares at the poles average 3 inches per side. In conclusion, the projection process used to make Mercator projection maps creates distortion at the poles, but not at the equator. This is why Greenland, which is close to the North Pole, looks larger than it is.
• Communicate: Make a video, write a report, or give a presentation to educate others about the experiment.

Who invented the scientific method?

The scientific method was not invented by any one person, but is the outcome of centuries of debate about how best to find out how the natural world works. The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle was among the first known people to promote that observation and reasoning must be applied to figure out how nature works. The Arab Muslim mathematician and scientist Hasan Ibn al-Haytham (known in the western world as Alhazen) is often cited as the first person to write about the importance of experimentation. Since then, a large number of scientists have written about how science should ideally be conducted and contributed to our modern understanding of the scientific method. Those scientists include Roger Bacon, Thomas Aquinas, Galileo Galilei, Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, John Hume, and John Stuart Mill. Scientists today continue to evolve and refine the scientific method as they explore new techniques and new areas of science.

Do scientists actually use the scientific method?

Scientists do use the scientific method, but not always exactly as laid out in the organized steps taught in the classroom. Just like a chef might make a few changes to a recipe because of the ingredients at hand, a scientist may modify the scientific method by skipping steps, jumping back and forth between steps, or repeating a subset of the steps because he or she is dealing with imperfect real-world conditions. But scientists always strive to keep to the core principles of the scientific method by using observations, experiments, and data to support or reject explanations of how a phenomenon works. While experimenting is considered the best way to test explanations, there are areas of science, like astronomy, where this is not always possible.