I come from a STEM background, and bias in research is a big issue, like I imagine it is in all fields, and one of the major sources of bias is constructing a narrative of your experiment as that tends to lead one to find the result they want, and not the correct result. However, historical research is often presented as a narrative, so does this lead to an increased risk of biased research? If so, how is it accounted for?
This is one of the biggest differences between history and the STEM fields. The thing is, over in STEM, you lot don't really deal with humans, as such. History, on the other hand, is all about humans. It's written by humans, written for humans, researched by, interpreted by, and presented by humans, for the benefit of humans.
The problem here is that the human is a stupid, selfish, blinkered, biased creature who is incapable of objectivity or neutrality. A human's memory is a self-serving thing, easily bent to presenting themself in the best possible light. Moreover, a human has an incredibly limited point of view; what a human thinks is happening to them right now may not even be actually what is happening when one looks at it from a more detached perspective.
It's not a question of whether a source is biased - they all are. I'm Filipino, I'm always going to write a different perspective of the Philippine-American War as compared to an American writing of the same thing. The question is, how is the source biased, and how does their bias affect their point of view? I refer you to my usual set of previous posts when asking about bias:
Further links in next post because argh tag limit.