Research Practice: Efficiently and Effectively Performing Your Experiments

Scientific studies are often time consuming, laborious, and expensive. It is therefore important to perform them as efficiently and effectively as possible. Ideally, you do not want to make unnecessary mistakes, as they will waste your time, money, and resources. Therefore, it is important to carefully plan your experiments before starting them. Spending a few hours planning can save weeks or months performing research that is inaccurate or irrelevant. It is also important to establish quality control checks throughout your studies, as they can help you rapidly identify any problems that arise. You can then rectify these problems quickly before you waste too much time. In this chapter, we highlight the importance of planning, good laboratory practices, safety assessments, and preliminary experiments in designing strong scientific studies. We also highlight the factors to consider where performing experiments, collecting data, and storing data.