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Even in the age of the internet, the best places to get a scoop are at science conferences and in scientists' own laboratories

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Coal mining in Karkar, Afghanistan
Get your hands dirty: Conferences are perfect for networking with some of the major players in a particular scientific field. Photograph: Paula Bronstein/Getty Images

My tip for budding science writers is this: talk to scientists, and not just when they publish. Go to conferences, visit their labs, establish relationships and a dialogue. Open channels of communication with scientists and keep them open (without harassing them of course) because that's still the best way to find out what's happening in their world.

In the UK political journalists haunt Westminster and financial ones lurk in the City. They know what's happening in those communities because they have one foot inside them. The good ones manage to strike the right balance between complicity and scepticism. They have a wide range of sources and they know where to go for a different opinion. In short, they understand that both politics and finance are social activities.

Science is no less social, but it is truly global, which means that it lacks a physical centre in this or any other country. The solution scientists have found is to meet at conferences, which is why airplanes are full of them. It's at conferences that old alliances split and new ones form, theories are born, murdered and revived, and stories suggest themselves.

At a conference, you should listen to the plenary lectures, but you should also find out what people are talking about in the cafes and corridors. You need to be wary of unpublished findings – leapfrogging peer review is not advisable – but all knowledge is useful. Conferences are also good opportunities for finding wise advisers: people with a deep understanding of the field who are willing and able to put novelty in perspective.

Ten or twenty years ago, attending conferences was the best if not the only way for scientists to get an up-to-the-minute overview of what was happening in their field. That's less true nowadays because it's so easy to communicate by other means. On the other hand, scientists themselves need help extracting the essential from the vast amount of information that is available.

A conservative estimate of the number of papers published annually on the subject of the brain alone is around 50,000, according to a brief interrogation of PubMed. Nobody can keep track of that kind of output. The advantage of a conference is that, assuming you choose the right one, many if not all of the big players in a field will be on hand to make sense of that research. They may not agree with each other, but that's OK. A conference is a forum for hypothesis, antithesis and sometimes even synthesis.

It's not always possible to attend, of course. Professional science writers and journalists may find that the editorial budget doesn't stretch to a plane ticket to Toronto, especially in these austere times. This is where, if you're a scientist or a student of science, you may have an advantage. If you're going anyway, keep your ear to the ground, ask questions, bring us back something new.

If you're not a scientist but you're curious, there are plenty of conferences that are open to the public. Labs occasionally open their doors. Go to a public lecture and stay on for the question-and-answer session; you'll find that many scientists like talking about their work, and a good old-fashioned conversation can be very illuminating.

Pay attention and before you know it, you'll have a scoop and a generous cash prize on your hands. Not to mention a glittering new career ahead of you.

Laura Spinney is a writer based in Lausanne, Switzerland

Favourite science writing

"The doomsday strain" by Michael Specter, The New Yorker
"Culture club: All species welcome" by Kate Douglas, New Scientist

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