Lab 6 Flashcards
Peer review
is defined as the evaluation of a scientific communication by qualified individuals (i.e., experts in the field).
Reviewers are expected to be impartial and comment to improve the quality of the work or the performance of the experiment.
The review process also provides credibility.
Realistically peer review is done through scientists screening the submission of manuscripts and funding applications, where those that meet the accepted standards of the discipline are accepted and the dissemination of irrelevant findings, unwarranted claims, unacceptable interpretations, and personal views is prevented
research hypotheses
a statement or question that is based on existing knowledge, explains how or why a phenomenon occurs, links an effect to a variable, is testable, potentially refutable with at least two outcomes and refers to a mechanism.
Which hypotheses should be discussed when writing a scientific article or proposal?
Only the research hypotheses.
The statistical hypotheses are helpful for interpreting your results (did you see support for your prediction?), but they are not discussed in a scientific article or a proposal.
When an ecologist reports their results, they do not report their statistical (alternative and/ or null) hypotheses.
Instead, they clearly report their research hypothesis and predictions in the introduction of their paper, and discuss if the results provided support for their hypothesis in the discussion.
How do the statistical hypotheses help?
In statistics, two specific hypotheses are used for any statistical comparison: the null and alternative hypothesis.
When we conduct a statistical test or comparison, we are actually testing the null hypothesis.
Because the test is done with reference to the null, we can only reject or fail to reject our null hypothesis.
Your null and alternative hypotheses can help you clearly interpret your research results when using statistics, and it is therefore important to have these clearly outlined in your notes.
The null hypothesis
It is usually constructed as the treatment having no effect or random chance for the test conducted.
In more general terms, the null hypothesis is usually a hypothesis of no difference or no relationship between the parameters.
If we reject the null hypothesis, we cannot therefore state that we have proven that our alternative hypothesis was correct, only that our alternative hypothesis was supported.
if we cannot reject the null hypothesis, then we have no evidence of a difference and conclude that no difference exists, or random chance could have caused this result.
the alternative hypothesis
is usually related to your research hypothesis, and typically follows from the prediction you have made.
It is important to note that in biology there may be more than one alternative hypothesis, and they may not be mutually exclusive.
Also remember that if there were multiple possibilities for alternative hypotheses, your research hypothesis may not be supported just because you have rejected your null hypothesis.
