How to troubleshoot experiments

Everyone has had that frustrating experience of a routine experiment failing to work as planned. Troubleshooting is at the heart of every successful research project, but it is an often-overlooked and uncredited part of the process. ‘It’s detective work, getting to the bottom of what happened in an experiment,’ says Alison Frontier, an organic chemist at the University of Rochester in the US and curator of the practical chemistry website Not Voodoo. ‘If it didn’t work, why didn’t it work? And if you can figure that out, then you can correct it.’

Here the experts offer a few suggestions on how you can start to solve the mystery of what went wrong.