I recently listened to Episode 174 from the podcast “People Behind the Science”, hosted by Dr. Marie McNeely. This is a great episode where Dr. Dawn Bazely, an ecologist and professor at York University, is interviewed about her field of research in plant-animal interactions. Towards the end (57:10), Dr. Bazely provides a piece of advice towards everybody in science: that they learn how to work with other people effectively because collaborating is very common in science and research. Learning how to trust colleagues and work together despite differences in personalities and opinions are crucial skills that she says many people aren’t born with, but rather must work at and develop. She suggests the resource, Collaboration and Team Science: A Field Guide by Michelle Bennett, Howard Gadlin, and Samantha Levine-Finley from the National Institutes of Health, to help develop these skills.
I think the advice Dr. Bazely gave to people in science is excellent. I agree that learning to collaborate and work as a team through trust and communication is very important, but not just in the field of science. These skills are applicable to many facets of life. For example, some aspect of teamwork or needing to communicate with colleagues is vital in team sports, throughout school for group projects, and in almost every type of career nowadays. These skills are also vital in keeping healthy relationships with friends, family or a partner.
My advice:
One piece of advice I would like to share (which is relevant to #BIOL4095!) involves finding peer-reviewed journal articles for research papers. This is something many people I know, including myself, struggled with initially in university, and is something that I really only learned how to do effectively last year while I was writing two final papers that required 30 and 40 peer-reviewed articles respectively.
To begin my research, I access an online journal database such as Web of Science, Scopus, etc. (read about how to access these databases here) and then search for articles relating to the topic of my paper. I then read the abstracts of some articles and download the ones I think might be useful for my paper. I typically stop at between five and ten articles and then read each of them fully, making notes on the information I might use in my paper. As I do this, I make sure to reference the original source of each piece of information I use, since these articles typically reference other pieces of literature. This provides me with many more sources, some of which I may choose to investigate further if I need more information. This process quickly helps me reach the amount of resources I need and then some!
For example, let’s say you originally select five articles to read fully. If you use original information from each of those articles you will have five sources. Then, for each article, if you use information from five sentences that do not originate from that article, but come from five different referenced articles, you will have 25 more sources, bringing the total to 30!
Applied Plant Ecology Winter 2020 