Quality Assurance and Quality Control in the Lab

This week was mostly a week of QA/QC at the lab. QA/QC refers to quality assurance or quality control protocols, and is not unique to the natural sciences. In science, QA/QC steps range from running additional samples through a machine to evaluate contamination levels (like I explained during some of my dissertation work), using standard reference materials to evaluate calibration of machinery, to having multiple researchers perform calculations and analyses steps and comparing the results. QA/QC steps help preserve the integrity of experiments, data collection, and results, and documenting these protocols provide transparency--an aspect of scientific research that isn't always maximized by researchers.

This week, as part of the QA/QC process, we found a few small coding issues that led to changes in some of the mathematics for the model. Fortunately, we had not moved on to the calibration step in the model, where these incorrect values could have mislead the model calculations. Additionally, as part of the QA/QC process, we are working to document all our decision making, data wrangling, and coding steps, so that our collaborators and future researchers understand how we got to our end results. I even created a file where I plotted all the data, plotted the average--which came from a different file--and evaluated the fit of the averages to the data as another QA/QC step.

For early career and young scientists, QA/QC steps in your workflow is essential. If you need to take a break from your work and return, you want to make sure that you understand how you conducted the work in the first place, whether its experimental, analytical, or coding. Documenting your steps and writing notes in your coding files throughout your process, helps maintain the integrity of scientific research and will likely save you headaches in the future.

Tune in next week to see what else we are doing in the lab. I hope you had a great Halloween and if you are a parent, that you appropriately taxed your children's candy hauls.