Assess your conflicts of interest

  1. Are you close friends with the authors?
  2. Are you from the same institution?
  3. Do you directly compete with the authors?
  4. Have you collaborated with the authors in the last 5 years?
  5. Understand your biases
  6. Ethnic and Gender Biases – the assumption that certain genders or ethnic backgrounds produce inferior research.
  7. Geographic bias – the assumption that research that comes from certain countries is of higher or lower quality.
  8. Prestige bias – the assumption that research from known universities is better than research from institutions that are not well recognized.
  9. Model Bias – The assumption that certain models are better than others for studying or understanding natural phenomena.
  10. Positive Bias – The assumption that research with a positive result better in quality than negative results which are scrutinized more carefully.