What do you call the characteristic of a researcher who is inquisitive possesses reflective thinking and investigates the things situations and problems around him?

If you’re considering a career in research, or embarking on a PhD, you may be wondering what are the typical characteristics of a researcher?

Although people with many different personalities and backgrounds go into research, there are a few common traits which can help to ensure success.

In this post we’ll identify the key qualities of a good researcher and I’ll also provide a few suggestions everyone can use to become a better researcher.

Let’s go!

A note on how personalities are constructed

Our personalities are made up of character traits which are partly down to our genetics and partly down to the interactions our genes (us!) have had with our environments. This continual interaction means that our personalities also change and evolve over time.

The good news is that it’s entirely possible to build skills and habits in a character trait which doesn’t come naturally to you.

So if one of the characteristics isn’t something you recognise in yourself please don’t feel disheartened. I strongly believe research should be inclusive and that anyone can be a good researcher if they’re willing to put the work in.

If you’re interested in learning more about personality types I’d recommend checking out 16personalities.com which discusses the 16 Myers Briggs personality types. You can fill in a free 10 minute quiz to learn which of them you’re most closely aligned with.

The ‘Career Paths’ and ‘Workplace Habits’ sections under your personality type may help you to recognise if you’d personally find fulfillment from a career in research.

Now that we’ve covered how personalities are contructed, let’s discuss the key characteristics of a researcher.

What are the key characteristics of a researcher?

From my experience, successful researchers tend to share many of the following traits:

Curiosity

Good researchers are curious and inquisitive about the world around them. Typically a strong motivation for wanting to carry out research is to either better understand, or help to solve, unanswered problems.

Do you often question the world around you? If so you’re showing exactly the type of curiosity which is one of the main characteristics of a researcher. In fact, this curiosity is very common among all of us as children and sadly many of us seem to lose it once we mature and pursue traditional careers. This isn’t the case if you’re a researcher!

For example, researchers around the world ask questions such as:

• How do trees communicate?
• Could new materials improve our energy storage capabilities?
• Why are some corals more resilient to climate change than others?
• How can we help the human body to better regenerate itself?

The great thing with science is that you can keep delving deeper and curiosity can help to keep you pushing on to better understand the problem. Sometimes you’ll even uncover more questions than you resolve which can open up new branches of research. These could easily become research projects in their own right!

That’s why another one of the qualities of a good researcher is having…

Organisational Skills

To me, being organised means a couple of different things:

1. Data management: Having a clear idea of the work I’ve already done. For example: If my supervisor asked to see the details of a certain experiment, can I quickly find them? This can come down to good note taking and organising data in a sensible way.
2. Time management: So that I can do the most effective work in the present and future. This can include everything from smart scheduling of meetings, to making goals and staying accountable.

Let’s briefly dive into both:

Organisational skills: data management

Research projects typically involve many experiments followed by collating and analysing the associated data. A typical PhD project may involve dozens or even hundreds of experiments, each of which may comprise many samples. It can be easy to get lost in the sea of work.

If you’re not careful this can mean unncessarily needing to repeat experiments. Or even worse you could analyse existing results thinking they’re from a different experiment than the one they really are. It is critically important when you come to publish your research that you can provide details for all of your experiments and clearly know the relationship between samples.

For example, was an unusual data point collected in a different batch to the others? Was the batch of chemicals different? Reviewers can, and do, ask for details which you may not immediately think of being relevant at the time of the experiments.

Being organised is the best way to avoid this unnecessary stress, extra workload and potential bad science.

My suggestions:

• Take photos of experiments. Even if the experiment seems mundane, photos can be very useful. You may need to repeat the experiment in the future or include the photo in a presentation, report or publication.
• Track your experiments. In the past I’ve kept a physical lab book to document all my experiments and then used spreadsheets to keep track of all my experiments over time. The exact workflow which works for you will depend a lot on your own style and field but the crucial thing is: write down everything, particularly what changes between experiments. Small details you may not think are relevant at the time may become important later for your papers and thesis.
• Back everything up. Please have all of your data, including the photos you take, backed up. Bonus points for backing up to the cloud where you can then access the data from multiple computers and easily share folders with colleagues. Many universities have partnerships with places like Microsoft’s OneDrive so you can store all your data there seamlessly for free.

Organisational skills: time management

Beyond diligent note taking and experiment tracking to manage all the data you’re creating, being organised is critical to ensure you manage your time effectively.

Unlike short undergraduate projects, you really can’t leave all the work for your PhD (or postdoc) until right at the end!

As a researcher, trying to be as organised as possible can help in many ways, such as:

• Remembering to buy food and eat your lunch so that you can work effectively. Personally I choose to make food in advance which I figure is more healthy and definitely saved me money compared to outlets at university. You can read this short series I wrote about meal prep.
• Keeping an up to date calendar. If you do a lot of experiments in the lab, especially with equipment which needs booking, add this too for realistic amounts of time. This way you can ensure you’re not haphazardly rushing some lab work because you’re stressed and late for a meeting you should never have agreed to.
• Putting together a plan for future experiments, helping to ensure you make time for the most critical work.
• Making a clear plan of tasks you need to get done, and just as importantly: when they need to get done by. Experiments, undergraduate marking, editing reports, claiming expenses, submitting abstracts to conferences… researchers typically balance a lot of different tasks at once. Being organised can help you to prioritise whilst ensuring nothing gets missed.

Making changes such as these will make it much less likely that you’ll become overwhelmed by your research.

Everyone can become more organised!

Psst. Do you want an Experiment Checklist that breaks down the steps to ensure you’re staying organised before, during and after carrying out your research experiments? Click the button below.

Open Mindedness

On multiple levels it is so important that as a researcher you can remain both neutral and open minded about your research:

1. When you’re carrying out your experiments sometimes there’ll be a certain outcome which you may be expecting or hoping to see. Tread carefully! Conducting research properly means being open to the results being different to what you initially expect. This may sound obvious but I’ve seen first hand how easy it is for people to see the results they want rather than the results which are really in front of them. This can lead researchers to continue down a direction which is potentially wasting money and resources and could potentially misrepresent the research to the wider scientific community.

1. Taking a step back from the results of individual experiments, being open to changing the path of your research can be a very useful trait in getting the most from your time in research. Sometimes it will be useful to consider adding in different techniques, trying new materials or starting a new collaboration. In particular if you consult experts in other disciplines, take what they’re saying seriously and challenge your preconceptions. These things can both improve your research and enrich your research experience.

Determination & Persistence

Determination and persistence are critical characteristics of a researcher.

Doing a PhD can be a long slog and there will often be times when you’d rather not be doing work that day. By nature experiments are often very repetitive and frankly quite boring to carry out, therefore it’s important to have the persistence to stick with it and remember that eventually it will pay off.

Making progress in research doesn’t have to include working endless hours, sometimes working smart can go a long way to helping with persistence. For instance one way of making progress even if you’re not feeling up for intensive work, is to look at what else needs doing.

There are often boring but straightforward tasks which can fall to the bottom of the to do list. For example in the past I’ve worked on tasks like moving data, writing up notes or submitting expense claims. Some of which you may even be able to do while listening to music or watching Youtube. So if you’re not feeling up for doing ‘proper’ work, these tasks can be a good way to still achieve results but without requiring too much brain power.

However it’s also important to be pragmatic and sensible with your time. One of the perks of working in academic research is that you are in control of your own schedule, so do feel free to cut your losses and take time off. You can then come in the next day refreshed and with a better mindset.

Acting Logically

In an ideal world you’d come up with a research hypothesis, carry out a short series of clearly defined experiments and out pops an interesting result which you can go on to publish. This can happen but in reality research is usually not as clear-cut.

Typically you’ll carry out increasing numbers of experiments and be unsure where to draw the line for what to include in your analysis and publications. Other times you may not be able to replicate your initial findings or may need to add an extra experiment which helps test your hypothesis but also adds complexity:

In addition to your own web of experiments to untangle and make sense of, you may also have external pressures. In an effort to create a higher impact paper I’ve seen researchers be under pressure from supervisors to combine their work with other researchers from the group into a super-paper* which tells a larger story than just their own contributions.

*I just came up with this name a moment ago, I don’t expect you’ll see these types of papers described as such elsewhere on the web!

Example of where logic can be helpful

Being able to think logically about the best way to both present your work, and carry out upcoming experiments, is a very useful characteristic to pick up as a researcher.

For instance, say you’ve got a year or two of data from experiments under your belt with some potentially interesting findings.

Acting logically can help in two ways:

1. Determining a logical plan for future experiments to help you to achieve the aims of your project. Sometimes it may help to work backwards: once you’ve figured out what you’d like to achieve in your project, determine what experiments you’ll have to do to get you there and use this as a basis for planning your experiments.
   Often a project can go in many directions. This can be intimidating and you won’t realistically have time to explore all the options. Therefore being logical about the most useful experiments can be critical to ensuring that you make progress during your research career.

Patience

Experiments rarely go perfectly as planned (and when they do that can be worrying!). Sometimes equipment hasn’t been used in a while and doesn’t work properly, things break or the data your collecting seemingly makes no sense. Sometimes simply not having someone available who knows how to use the kit can be a frustrating roadblock to progress.

As a researcher you need patience to deal with these times you’re stuck debugging an issues or reading an instruction manual when you’d rather be doing actual research. Remind yourself that this is all a necessary step in making progress towards the goal of your research. You may not see the progress day by day, or month by month, but remember to take a step back every so often to gain perspective and remind yourself that your efforts are helping to advance knowledge.

Trustworthiness – acting with integrity

Being a trustworthy individual and acting with integrity as a researcher should go without saying.

Even so, depending on your discipline there may be elements of your research for which common sense can only take you so far. It may not be until someone else does something which turns out to be wrong that you realise the proper way to behave.

Potentially contentious areas of research

• Experimenting on certain biological samples such as human tissue or live animal models
• Being mindful about disclosing specifics of your work outside of the research group, especially if it involves access to secure facilities or themes which may be picked up in the media
• Accessing sensitive data, such as human patient information

All of these place you in a position of trust and it is critical that you act with integrity and abide by regulations and governance. Your university should have guides for it such as Imperial’s for animal work.

Ideally when you get started on your research your induction to the team and lab will include giving you the low down on the proper protocols. Always err on the side of caution, there are no silly questions and in fact any supervisor should be happy to see their researchers asking questions about ethics.

Other scenarios

Outside of these niche cases which only apply to relatively few researchers, more generally acting with integrity could include things such as :

• Owning up to breaking things in the lab
• Behaving properly around your lab mates and in particular if you’re involved with supervising more junior researchers

One main area across every discipline that trustworthiness and acting with integrity apply to is data analysis. While manipulating results is an obvious no-no, it’s also vitally important not to omit data you do not like as this could mislead future researchers. Oftentimes there is a grey area for where to draw the line for what results to include in a paper, so discuss it with your supervisor and they should be very supportive.

Your university should provide guidance on research ethics (example webpages for Imperial) so I suggest giving that a read as a starting point.

Self-reliance

During a PhD you are personally responsible for your project and you’ll be the one who has to do and defend the work being performed. To this end it’s critical that you are comfortable working on your own, managing your own time and making research decisions with minimal supervision.

In an ideal world you’ll have a supervisor that you meet up with regularly. So when you’re choosing a supervisor it’s a great help if you can speak to existing PhD students to find out the frequency of meet-ups and level of support. But ultimately you need to be comfortable driving the work and taking ownership of the progress.

That brings us on to our final characteristic of a researcher which is being…

Co-operative

You’ll get a lot more done during your research if you work well with others.

This could mean helping other people with their experiments when they need an extra pair of hands or politely asking for advice from someone who has expertise in something you want to try. Do be careful to ensure you’re not committing too much to doing other people’s work. These same people can also become your support network when things don’t go as planned and may help you to find a way through.

Starting new collaborations can be a highlight of a research project and I urge you to make the most of these types of opportunities. Just make sure to run it past your supervisor first. Not only could this be a learning experience, it could increase the quality and quantity of your own research output. I feel really thankful to have been involved with all the collaborations I’ve taken part in.

How to become a better researcher

Hopefully when reading through the various characteristics of a researcher you’ve been able to spot several traits which already match which your own personality.

But if there are any characteristics of a researcher you don’t recognise in yourself don’t despair! We can all work on ourselves and even if it makes you feel uncomfortable at times it’ll help you to grow as a person and researcher.

For instance, if you’re not naturally particularly organised, you can certainly develop this characteristic like skills in other parts of our lives.

This post has already becoming much longer than I first envisioned so I won’t go in depth on ways you could develop each quality. If you’d like to see a post on that let me know in the comments. Instead for now, here are a few suggestions for developing these characteristics to become a better researcher.

How to improve as a researcher

• Get organised. Becoming organised doesn’t just help in the obvious ways as in the section above. For instance it’ll help you to see your progress (good motivation to stay determined and act patiently), regulate effort to avoid burnout, see the bigger picture and therefore act both logically and hopefully become more open to new avenues of research and collaboration.
• Work on your weak points. If having read this post you’ve identified any characteristics of a researcher which you could do with some work on, don’t be afraid to address them. Operating outside of your comfort zone will help you to grow.
• Request feedback. During my PhD I had weekly meetings with my main supervisor and strongly suggest doing something similar. Not only was it a way to track progress and stay focussed but it can be an opportunity to ask for feedback on what you’re doing well and where you could improve. It can also be useful to speak openly with your peers to find what tips they have.
• Subscribe to this site! How could I resist adding this cheeky suggestion! There are dozens of posts about all aspects of research and PhDs and lots of new upcoming content on the way. As always if you have any suggestions for posts you’d find useful please do let me know.

I hope you’ve found this post about the characteristics of a researcher useful. Don’t worry if you don’t see all these traits in yourself just yet, they can be a work in progress which you’ll develop as a researcher. If you have any thoughts on other essential characteristics of a researcher let me know in the comments section below. You can subscribe for future content here:

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