Yousef, T., Clemente, E.C. et al
Uh oh! Do you have a lab meeting coming up, and you (somehow) don’t have any data to report? Don’t panic! Why go through all the trouble of doing experiments, when you can just do some evasive tweaks? Here are our top suggestions:
Get creative!
Change your graphs around. Make that bar graph a box and whisker plot. Change the colour of your fluorescence. Flip your images upside-down!
Redo your stats…. again.
It’s not p-hacking if your ultimate goal is to create bullshit rather than significance! Was that a repeated measures or independent values analysis? Oh, who cares?
Focus on details!
Give everyone a very lengthy explanation of how you’ve optimised every single step of that 3 day long protocol – if you lull them to sleep with the ins and outs of your most boring protocol, they will forget to ask you about results!
“The equipment is down…”
So what that it’s the 90th time you’ve used that excuse. How can you do your experiments if the necessary apparatuses aren’t working? It’s not like you can… find something else to do in the meantime… right? No. Definitely not.
Say you’ve been reading and writing.
You’re a scholar, so obviously it makes sense to take long stretches of time to do nothing but read… while watching Netflix.
Don’t even go.
Stay home! Say you’re sick! Pretend you forgot… even though they’ve been at the same time for the last 3 years you’ve been in the lab. When they ask if you can just send them your data, simply reply, “no ❤️.”
