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"Global data quality assessment and the situated nature of “best” research practices in biology"

This paper reflects on the relation between international debates around data quality assessment and the diversity characterizing research practices, goals and environments within the life sciences. Since the emergence of molecular approaches, many biologists have focused their research, and related methods and instruments for data production, on the study of genes and genomes. While this trend is now shifting, prominent institutions and companies with stakes in molecular biology continue to set standards for what counts as "good science" worldwide, resulting in the use of specific data production technologies as proxy for assessing data quality. This is problematic considering (1) the variability in research cultures, goals and the very characteristics of biological systems, which can give rise to countless different approaches to knowledge production; and (2) the existence of research environments that produce high-quality, significant datasets despite not availing themselves of the latest technologies. Ethnographic research carried out in such environments evidences a widespread fear among researchers that providing extensive information about their experimental set-up will affect the perceived quality of their data, making their findings vulnerable to criticisms by better-resourced peers. These fears can make scientists resistant to sharing data or describing their provenance. (Full article...)

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