The Research Workflow

Now that we've briefly introduced you to Open Science, and what it means in the context of this project, let's talk more about what you're going to be doing. In a nutshell, you are going to use the scientific method to learn something about an organism, in the controlled setting of a lab experiment.

We expect that you have been exposed to the principles of the Scientific Method before this, while you were still in high school. As such, we are assuming that you have a little bit of prior knowledge to draw from. However, we need to update traditional representations of the scientific method by including the steps of a registered report. The diagram below shows the steps in a nutshell.

Figure 4. Visual representation of the steps of the Scientific Method.
Image by Robin Young, licensed under CC BY 4.0

The key update to the traditional representation of the scientific method is the inclusion of an “Independent review and feedback” step at the Design Experiment & Plan analysis stage. In the following sections, we will discuss each step of the scientific method, and how it applies in the context of this research project.