The folly of "authority"

When you do any piece of research you need to start with a research question. To get this you need to know what areas within your chosen field have gaps in.For example, if after doing your literature review you find there is no research into anxiety disorders in a prison population you could do some exploratory research, but first you need a question to answer.Once you have done that research (easier said than done) you publish your work and people get to break it apart.But as it is novel research the investigator would be the best person to ask if you had a question about anxiety disorders in a prison population.If s/he is a good scientist they will not go beyond the evidence in their discussion and comment on sources of error and things they would have done if they had more time, resources, access, etc.They will also play devil's advocate on what they could have done to improve the validity and rigour of the study.So as long as the scientists derives their conclusions from the evidence and can justify their conclusion in a transparent way, the research should speak for itself.Not the authority of the researcher.Does this help?

Another thing: be extra careful about people who start with:"I'm not a scientist, but...."An argument from no authority is not better than and argument from authority.