Running head: ANALYSIS OF THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD

Analysis of The Scientific Method

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Analysis of The Scientific Method 1

Analysis of The Scientific Method

The scientific method are the steps and processes that are followed in experimentation

so as to observe and answer questions. The method entails a series of steps that should be

followed empirically. The basic steps involved in the scientific method are; making an

observation, asking a question, doing a background search, formulating a hypothesis, making

assumptions, testing the prediction with an experiment, determine if the procedure is working,

analyzing the data, draw conclusions and communicate the results. The article discussed in this

paper is; Women Are Underrepresented in Computational Biology: An Analysis of the Scholarly

Literature in Biology, Computer Science and Computational Biology, (2017) the authors are

Kevin S. Bonham and Melanie L. Stefan. This article discusses about the underrepresentation of

women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields. The authors note

that some of the fields in STEM are more represented by both gender than others. The field of

biology is noted to have more women than the field of computational science. The scientific

method steps that have been undertaken in this paper, was the recognition of the problem,

which is underrepresentation of women in STEM causes, the question asked by the authors is

whether this variation is equal in all the fields of STEM. The hypothesis made by the authors s

that computational biology which is an inter-disciplinary STEM field is more gender balanced.

The authors thereafter undertook the step of investigating and conducting research by

examining authorship data from academic databases with scholarly publications in

computational biology, computer science and biology to verify the claims.

In order to obtain the findings, the authors relied on database of PubMed as well as

biomedical publications which are administered by U.S National Library of Medicine. In

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determining the gender of the authors, they relied in the web service Gender-API.com. After

analyzing, the authors found out that the results were consistent with previous publications

whereby women were substantially less in being senior author positions than the first author

positions in publications which categorized in biology. This trend was observed in papers which

were labeled as computational biology. The authors observed however the percentage gap has

been narrowing over the years both in computational biology and biology. The discrepancy

between computational biology and biology was however consistent over the years.

The meaning of this study as inferred by the authors through their study is that women

were most likely to be authors in the field of quantitative biology publications rather than in

computer science publications as either first, second or middle author positions. The results

obtained by the authors does suggest that computational biology lies in the middle of computer

science and biology in general when it does come to the representation of women in

publications. This finding is not surprising due to the fact that computational biology is an inter-

disciplinary field when compared to biology which has few female authors occupying

authorship positions. This difference should not be attributed to the impact factor between

general biology and computational biology papers. The authors argue that it difficult to

ascertain the reasons as to why these findings are so. They however indicate that being first

authors I most papers require one to be the principal investigator. A number of females are

thus observed as being principal investigators in fields which are less non-STEM. In such fields,

the number of female authors are high. The authors acknowledge that biology attracts more

females than computational science, this explains why most females initially start in biology

fields then later shift to computational biology. The factors which influence this phenomenon
Analysis of The Scientific Method 3

are suggested by the authors to be studied in future publications so as to provide insight while

designing interventions which help in narrowing the gender gap in computational biology.

Studying this article has helped me understand the push for gender equality as being an

important issue in all facets of life. I agree women should be given opportunities to be in

positions to contribute to the scientific world by having vacancies such as principal investigators

allotted to them. More so, there is the need of ensuring females in general attempt to publish

more papers like their male counterparts. The issue of gender balance in my opinion should

also be considered in STEM fields by providing incentives towards females so that their can

input their contributions in these fields.

In summary, it is evident from the discussions presented above the investigation

conducted by the authors in determining women underrepresentation in STEM courses

particularly computational biology as evidenced in the minimal publications from female

authors. Women have been noted to be few in computational science and more in biology.

They are however evenly spread in computational biology. The assumption drawn on this

observation is that women prefer computational biology as they advance in the careers from

biology to computational biology. Secondly, female IN STEM fields are few in being principal

authors as compared to other non-STEM fields.

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Reference List

Bonham, K. S., & Stefan, M. I. (2017). Women are underrepresented in computational biology:

An analysis of the scholarly literature in biology, computer science and computational

biology. Plos Computational Biology, 13(10), 1-12. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005134