Research Methods for the Biosicences

The authors of Research Methods in the Biosciences are a biologist, a physicist and a chemist, a valuable combination when trying to develop a general textbook of this nature. The students we teach also vary widely both in their background, their confidence in maths, their use of computers and the degree course they are taking. All these are points we have considered carefully when deciding what to include in this book and its web site and the style we have used.

The content, and the approach taken, in this book and its web site have been developed over many years of teaching. From this we are aware of a number of needs that are not always met by existing text books in this area. For example there are a few books which consider issues relating to experimental design and very many statistics books. However this leaves the gap in the middle, where the role of statistics in the design of experiments seems to get left out. We have tackled this by combining our chapters on experimental design with those on statistics and we explicitly address such questions as "how many observations or samples or replicates do I need?".

We believe that students will gain confidence if they read about the sort of research that they carry out as undergraduates. So we have included lots of examples of research in each chapter, most of which are derived from undergraduate honours projects. In this way we have examples from a broad range of topics including human biology, microbiology, horticulture, animal science, ecology and environmental management, and we consider issues such as the time taken to complete the study and the seasonality of some work, issues that are often very important to undergraduates.

When teaching we are encouraged when our students think about what they are doing and why they are doing it. We have tried to help this process along by including questions scattered in each chapter and interactive exercises on our web pages. These questions/exercises are designed to make the best use of the print and online media. We know from experience that these types of questions help to check how much is understood and to pull ideas together.

Working together as a team we have learnt from each other and realised how much we do not know. Writing this book and web material has been a very positive experience for us and we hope the final product is useful to you.

Debbie Holmes
April 2007

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