Think about it… quality has different meanings and everything depends on the context. Are we speaking about quality in business? Or maybe in philosophy? There are another possibilities like quality in physics, or energy, or something like logical quality. Or the probably best known one for all of us: service quality. But, what is the connection between all them? In general, in general words, we could say the quality can be defined as a degree of customer satisfaction.
In science, the replicability of research is very important because reproducibility is a way to give it validity, to give it quality. Sadly, in the last time replicability in science is diminishing. There is growing alarm about results that cannot be reproduced and if there is something that we cannot deny is that science moves forward by corroborations: When, for example, researchers around the world verify each others’ results, giving transparency and robustness to the investigations.
In the article Misconduct accounts for the majority of retracted scientific publications (Ferric C. Fang, R. Grant Steen & Arturo Casadevall), the authors show a detailed review of 2,047 biomedical and life-science research articles indexed by PubMed, and demonstrate that two-thirds of all retractions are caused by scientific misconduct: plagiarism, fraud, and duplicate publication.
The way science is suppose to work should be practical and intuitive. The scientific method picks the approach to a problemwith precision, as well as the hypothesis of the same. This is followed by observation, which involves the collection of data in order to try to confirm or reject these working hypotheses through the experiments that are being analysed. Then, scientists start searching for a theory that can explain these hypotheses. In this way, if the results are confirmed, or, even without confirming them, the information obtained will be part of some pattern, which will allow us to formulate general laws which may explain all similar problems. Making other predictions, conducting experiments and observations, is also part of the process of the scientific method, which in the end will become a cycle where, if the results are in accordance with the theory, it allows to make other predictions. And, if the results do not agree, it will force us to continue to look for one that can give a good explanation to those hypotheses.
So, quality in science is very important! For this reasons and others more, do not hesitate to publish your all your work, may it beresearch articles, technical reports and white papers, review articles, experiment repetitions, discussions or negative results.
