How an Idea Becomes a Published Scientific Paper

Today, I’m here with Moiya McTier, a researcher and PhD candidate at Columbia University. She was the first student to get degrees in both astrophysics and folklore and mythology at Harvard. She also runs workshops to help people think like a scientist. 

Moiya is an expert in science communication as well as being a scientist herself, so today I want to ask her about the steps you have to go through to produce a scientific paper. How do you go from an idea to a published paper? Why should we trust these scientific publications more than other writing or news reports we find on the internet? 

I’ve said on this show before not to trust articles that don’t cite their sources, but we’ve not yet talked about why we should trust those cited sources to begin with. So, thank you for being here, Moiya.

Thanks for inviting me on.

So, I get an idea, I write it down and then it’s published, right? 

That’s the three step version, yeah. But there’s a lot more underneath the hood, otherwise it wouldn’t take five or six years to get a PhD, right? Starting from the beginning, people say that science starts with an idea, but it starts even before that. Because when I was starting grad school, one of the most intimidating things to me about the scientific process was coming up with an idea. Up until then, I had been doing research for a few years, but the research projects had always been handed to me and I’d never come up with my own idea or my own thesis for a research project. 

People say that science starts with an idea, but it starts even before that.

You have to go through a lot of training to get to the point where you’re able to come up with your own idea or research project. It starts with an idea, but there’s a lot that goes into that part as well. 

Could you maybe walk us through one of your recent projects?

Yeah, I’d love to. I actually just submitted for publication so this is the perfect time to talk about this. This idea actually wasn’t my own. One the faculty members in my department thought of this idea while he was in the shower. That’s where all the scientists do their best thinking!

So he thought about this idea and he brought it to me, and I thought it would be really exciting to explore. The idea that he had or the question that he wanted to answer was, ‘Are planets more likely to form around slow moving stars? Is there any sort of relationship between the speed of a star and whether or not it will host planets?’

I took that and ran with it. The thing I had to do next was figure out what type of data I...

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