I admit to being sensitive about this topic. I have spent 10 years in post-secondary schools. I am trained to do research. I have published in peer-reviewed scientific journals. Yet we were no more than a couple of weeks into this pandemic when someone who ought to have known better…Someone who specializes in occupational health and safety (emphasis mine) accusingly characterized me as an academic (as if that were a bad trait) and in a disparaging tone asked “Why Don’t You Do Your Own Research?”
Flashback: When I was a student money was more than a little tight. Trying to keep my old vehicle running I purchased a couple of basic tools. (The mechanics among you: You know just where this is going, don’t you?) Mechanical objects are not puzzled by pretense: What I did didn’t work and I’d have to take it to a mechanic. In frustration one of them told me one day “If you keep trying to do it yourself I’m going to charge you extra for clearing out the mess you make of it.” I couldn’t blame him, and lesson learned. He had spent his life learning how to, and doing mechanical work. Light bulb moment: Purchasing a tool kit does not a mechanic make. I’m the monkey at the typewriter expecting Shakespeare to result from my banging at the keys.
Do your own research. As if purchasing a computer and having an ISP and a search engine makes one capable of researching. I assure you there is more to it than that. To those who claim to have done their own research:
Did you perform a thoroughgoing review of at least a major chunk of all publications available across the history of the issue in question?
Did you write abstracts on all these articles?
Did you take a random sample of all or most of the articles published recently (like over the past 5 years or so) and review them in detail whether or not you liked the conclusions they drew?
Did you examine the sources of funding behind the research itself, or the ownership of the publication in which you found the article printed? Did you check for potential bias on the part of the owners or funding agencies?
Did you study and gain some mastery of the principles and practices of scientific research design? Do you understand how to evaluate the mechanics of a research project, whether it is quantitative or qualitative?
Did you master the statistical techniques used in processing and interpreting the data reported in the articles? Do you understand probability theory? Do you get that it is not uncommon that people use statistics to mislead and obscure rather than to illuminate?
Are you capable of evaluating and identifying the limitations inherent in the analytic methodology and/or the data itself? Did you examine the articles for logical errors?
Did you look into the researcher(s) and their employer(s) biographical information, checking for any patterns or biases that might have them viewing the data more subjectively than is apt for scientific work?
Did you look at the references cited and evaluate them in the same way you do the articles and authors that cite them?
If you did not, then whatever it is you did is not research. You engaged in a process that relied on search algorithms provided by agencies such as Google or Microsoft, agencies you either know are biased or you are too blind to even begin to do research. You wound up with a list of titles and you selected the ones that seemed most agreeable to you. You reached the same conclusions you started out with because you discounted anything that provided evidence to the contrary. You fell into a morass of expectations and confirmation biases and did nothing to maintain your objectivity or dis-enable your subconscious predilections and you reached a personalized set of conclusions that you view as if they had scientific validity. I assure you that they don’t.
Owning a socket set doesn’t make one a mechanic. Surfing the internet doesn’t make you a researcher.
If doing the tasks inherent in research seems daunting or for any other reason seems out of your reach, do not despair. There’s a reasonable substitute: Go to the websites controlled by agencies that are widely-recognized as having expertise and as doing high quality work…Agencies that have a stellar reputation. The World Health Organization. The Mayo Clinics. The national medical association, American or otherwise. Read sources like that, and rely upon what they say.
Remember that Science is developmental. If the answer today is different from yesterday’s it doesn’t mean anybody lied. It means someone demonstrated something that triggered a re-evaluation. Actually, if the answer remains the same year after year, there’s probably not a lot of scientific-quality research happening.