How to be a Sherlock Holmes in Science

Sherlock Holmes' induction method is very impressive as can be seen in all the cases written by Conan Doyle. I think that a student with the Sherlock Holmes skills would be the ideal one to perform a scientific project. But the question is how to become a Sherlock Holmes in Science. Of course this would not be trivial task but we can get some clues from the stories themselves.

By the way Holmes did not use the "deduction" method but rather the "induction" method. The deduction method goes from general premises, which are suppose to be true, to a particular conclusion while the induction takes particular cases as premises and from them it creates general conclusions. A nice explanation of the induction method can be found in the Umberto Eco's book The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Pierce.

The student can develop certain skills which would be very useful for his PhD, master, etc. by following the Holmes life style:

1. Keep a meticulous record of your activities. Either if you are doing experiments/theory or computer simulations, it is very important to be organized. One way to accomplish this task is by using a notebook, any time you perform a simulation or an experiment write in your notebook what you did and of course write the date and the time. Otherwise you will not remember about that after some days or even hours. 
2. Take with you always a notebook when you go to conferences because that is the place where the new knowledge is shown. 
3. Be always curious. Even if your research area is particle physics there could be something interesting for you in a talk about chemistry. Try to focus on a certain area but not too much as to loose the interest in other interesting topics outside your field. 
4. Think always what could be the next point of this project to be considered? And when you know already what is the next point try to implement it by  yourself. Do not wait always until your adviser tells you what to do next. 
5. Attend courses even if you have already heard them. One can always learn new things from different lecturers. 
6. After some years working on a project (specially during the PhD) some people tend to think that their projects are very easy, simple such that any student could do it. I have found that this is not true in most of the cases. When we are looking at the same project for years we minimize our efforts and our results. If you are in this case ask some of your friends for an impartial opinion and I am sure that they will find very interesting aspects you cannot see in your work.
7. Search for information in books, scientific reviews, ask the people in your department. 
8. Be organized in your desktop, in your pc/laptop.
9. If you can help other students who are at the beginning of their projects it could be a good opportunity to interact with other people. Maybe in the future they could cross your way again and probably the conditions would be very different at that time (the others being the heads of the department where you are applying as a postdoc or professor).