In this document I share some thoughts about the “art of asking
scientific questions”.1
My goal is to share with you a rudimentary toolbox to work your way into
asking questions more frequently and more effectively.
Asking questions after a scientific presentation is very important. It is part of the dialectic of science. Questioning and discussing experiments, methods, results and interpretations is what makes science fun and so effective. Ideas bounce, conclusions are challenged, a new model emerges from the discussion. As scientists, we ought to question stuff.
After I give a talk, if nobody asks a question, I feel I did not do my job well. If I invite a guest speaker and after the seminar nobody in the hosting institute asks a question, I feel I am letting down both the guest and the audience. No questions asked is a symptom that presenter and audience are out of sync.
Let’s start from the basics. Why would I ask questions at all?
Here are a few realistic reasons:
I found useful to think “asking questions” as a specific task, which
I set even before the talk starts.
Let me clarify. I sometimes explicitly decide before a talk that I will
have 2-3 questions written down ready to be asked (it’s OK if I do not
get to ask them). I sometimes write “2” and I circle it at the top of my
notebook page. That number will indicate the number of questions I set
myself to have at the end of the presentation. Whenever I moderate a
session at a conference, I host an invited speaker, or I am invited to a
conference, I need to have questions to stimulate the discussion and
actively contribute to the scientific debate. If I am in the “I really
should ask a question after this talk” mode, I will avidly take notes
and write down a question as soon as something comes up during the talk.
If I listen to someone’s presentation with this “asking questions”
mindset, I find it much easier to come up at the end with questions, as
opposed to casually thinking about possible questions only at the end of
a talk. In other words, asking questions can be exercised, and I believe
it is an important part of our scientific training. You can definitely
practice and learn to ask questions.
This seems to be a tough one.
As you know well by now, each talk has a rather standard structure, with
only a few limited accepted variations. It starts with a title slide,
then continues with the background information, the gap in knowledge,
the main research question, the approach/methods, the results, the
interpretation of the results, the discussion of the results in the
broad context of the field, the conclusions, the future directions
(sometimes), and the acknowledgments of the people, institutions and
funding bodies that contributed to the project.
The great news is that you can ask questions that relate to pretty much
all the components of the presentation, starting from the title, all the
way to the acknowledgments.
Here are a few examples:
Background: do I agree with the provided information? Is there
something that was missed that would have led to a different formulation
of the question? Did I know about the background that was provided? Can
the author tell more about the background information? What if some info
provided as a background was recently refuted/challenged? We should ask
for the presenter’s opinion.
Methods: Do I understand the methods? Can the authors explain
how the methods work in some more detail? I am not sure I am following.
How can one go from a to b? What is 16S rRNA Sequencing? How does the
pipeline work? How do you correct for batch effect? Were the experiments
done at the same time of the day? Were experiments done both in male and
female mice? Why did the authors use killifish instead of
zebrafish?
Results: This is exciting. However, I am not sure I understand
that plot. What is shown on the x axis? What is on the y axis? What does
the legend indicate? What is a t-SNE plot? Did I see gene A appearing on
that list? Can you tell me more about it? Did you check which paralog
was that? What does that gene do?
Interpretation: While I see that the interpretation presented
is plausible, can an alternative scenario also explain the observed
results? How can the presenter choose one interpretation over the other?
Shall they rather test for a, b, and c, in order to be sure they got the
mechanism/structure right? Are there additional interpretations for the
presented results? This is the place to ask yourself (and perhaps the
presenter) whether the title reflects the presented results. If it does
not (sometimes that’s the case), for example you can ask: you titled
your talk “Evolutionary Ecology of Aging”, but then you talked about
demography and genomics. Did I miss the part about ecology?
Discussion: This is the place where the results are discussed
in the context of what is already known, and where the true
novelty/relevance of the results is discussed. Often, the discussion of
each result occurs in the same slide where results are shown. This is
the place to compare the presented results with something that is
already known, that was already published, or perhaps with some personal
observation/finding. Here you can ask “If what you showed is true, does
it then mean that a, b, c, are also possible/true/false?”
Future directions: even here we can ask questions: can the
presenter consider doing additional experiments? Should the presenter
perhaps check dataset a, b, c, to further test their model? Is the shown
mechanism evolutionary conserved (rather frequent, generic, and
evergreen question)? Did the authors know whether gene A is associated
with any known human disease (another classic)?
Acknowledgments: you can ask whether funding agency X, which
shows in your acknowledgment page, still funds projects related to the
topic presented.
As you see, you can ask questions that address virtually each part of the presentation. That’s cool, there’s plenty of room for questions.
One thing is to have a question in mind. Another one is to formulate
and voice the question though. I mean, I think I do have a question, but
I am wondering whether I am formulating it well enough. My suggestion
here is to write down the question. Reading the question is perfectly
fine.
What if I am afraid to speak up? A trick that works for me to mitigate
the social anxiety of being in a crowded hall with other judging heads
is to sit at the front rows. In this way I can hear the presentation
more clearly, I get less distracted, and being at the front I forget
there is plenty of people behind me, so I am less nervous.
Here is a collection of tricks that might help you ask questions more often:
Everyone asks questions in a unique way. If you pay attention, different people tend to ask each the same type of question, with a rather consistent formulation. Some people are more focused on the general model (big picture), other about technical details. By practicing “asking questions”, you will find out what type of questions suit you best.
What this document is NOT about, is the etiquette of asking questions. I am not thinking about how to ask questions politely or professionally. Rather, I am sharing thoughts about how to come up with a list of reasonable questions and what they could be about.↩︎