Biogang:Projects/Bioinformatics Career Survey 2008

Hello, here's a couple of points

• Please be nice to the people who contributed the data. By filling in the form everyone agreed for the data to be released online, but please use it for good things and not anything that can be considered nasty or malicious.
• The data belongs to everyone so, you don't need my permission to post any analysis of the results on your blog or website, you just need to follow the CC license. So go crazy, the more analysis the better.
• Michael Barton 12:24, 31 August 2008 (EDT)

Sharing and Collaborating

I think it would great to combine the results together into a PDF, or possibly even an editorial in an open access bioinformatics journal if there was the interest in doing so. So if you've posted some analysis on your blog, you could be my new best friend by also posting the analysis on the survey results page. Further more If you think there's something fishy about some of the results, you can let me know, or even better fork the data on github, update it, then send me a pull request. Other uses of Github to share interesting tit-bits of analysis may also earn special praise.

• Michael Barton 14:39, 26 August 2008 (EDT):

Getting the data

The current master version of the data can be downloaded in CSV format from Github. Bear in mind the file downloaded from this link may change if the survey results are updated, but hopefully this will be a good thing, for example if obvious erroneous entries are removed. If you prefer to manually keep track of data, you can clone the git respository yourself.

git clone git://github.com/michaelbarton/bioinformatics-career-survey.git

Data Format

The format of the data is comma separated value, and contains the following columns which relate the original survey questions. The columns for nation and country originally included specific country name, but after concerns about this being used to identify people this data was converted to world wide macro regions to provide additional anonymity.

• timestamp - Date the survery result was entered
• career - What area do you work in?
• salary - What is your current per year salary? (in US dollars)
• nation - What nationality are you?
• country - Which country/state do you currently work in?
• background - What was/is your academic background?
• years - How many years have you worked in the field of bioinformatics?
• bioinformatics - Which fields of bioinformatics do you currently work in?
• position - What is your current position?
• papers - How many papers have you been an author on?
• author - Have many first or last author papers have you published?
• like - Pick up to three reasons why you like your job
• dislike - Pick up to three reasons why you dislike your job
• happy - Overall, how do you feel about your job?
• tools - Excluding those for software development, what the bioinformatics tools you use most in your research?
• applications - What web applications do you regularly use?
• future - How many more years do you see your self working in science?
• question - Finally, as an open question where do you see the field of bioinformatics in ten years time?
• languages - Which programming languages do you regularly use?

Thank yous

A big thank you to everyone who filled out the survey. This survey was also helped by everyone who posted the questionnaire on their blog or website, or who offered suggestions on creating and releasing the data. If I've missed you out, I'm sorry but please add yourself to the list below.

Jan Aerts Julian Baldwin Denis C Bauer Pedro Beltrao Bioinformatics.org Maxine Clarke Mauricio Herrera Cuadra The Daily Scan Gioby Duncan Hull Bill Hooker Lars Juhl Jensen Chih-Horng Kuo Roland Krause Michael Kuhn Chris Lasher Michele Mattioni Paulo Nuin Cameron Neylon Nature India The OpenHelix Blog The PhD blog Neil Saunders Deepak Singh Paolo Sonego Paweł Szczęsny Jason Tsai Ricardo Vidal Matt Wood Shirley Wu