"What is high quality research?"
"What can you do as a (PhD) researcher to assure the quality of your research?"
These were the central questions discussed during the CEL PhD Symposium on High Quality Research, held on January 21 at the Erasmus University Rotterdam.
The two speakers, Daniel Lakens and Rolf Zwaan, stressed the importance of keeping the following wisdom in mind:
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool” – Feynman, 1974
The first speaker of the day, Daniel Lakens, Assistant Professor at the Human-Technology Interaction group at Eindhoven University of Technology focused on how to improve the quality of research data and how we make inferences. The goal here is to increase contributions to a cumulative body of knowledge. Additionally, he talked about how to make research lines more efficient.
Rolf Zwaan, Professor of Psychology at Erasmus University Rotterdam, talked about questionable research practices in science and how to detect them. Furthermore, he showed that sharing data and materials (open science) and pre-registering studies are both powerful ways to increase quality of research.
Throughout the day, there were many active discussions between the participants and the speakers. The PhD students now know how to do high quality research.
Please find the presentations below.