| > how do you know if it's the graduate student's fault or the experiment's fault? Usually by - checking the original publications to make sure you are repeating the experiment correctly - checking (and monitoring) the experimental setup to make sure it is doing what you think it is doing and you aren't introducing errors - checking the data analysis - running "sanity check" experiments with the same setup to make sure it has no obvious flaws - comparing with recent replication experiments by other researchers - showing that the experiment and results are repeatable by multiple people in different organizations with their own lab setups - consulting with the original authors (who may be helpful or unhelpful) if they are available - comparing against other data sets - comparing against results from analytical modeling or simulation - looking for alternate explanations of the anomalous results and checking for whether they might be occurring etc. As others have noted, the same methods apply to sorting out conflicting experimental results regardless of who conducts the experiments. |