UK Research Software Survey 2014

Abstract

This spreadsheet contains the anonymised data collected as part of a survey of UK researchers in their use of research software.

We asked people specifically about “research software” which we defined as:

“Software that is used to generate, process or analyse results that you intend to appear in a publication (either in a journal, conference paper, monograph, book or thesis). Research software can be anything from a few lines of code written by yourself, to a professionally developed software package. Software that does not generate, process or analyse results - such as word processing software, or the use of a web search - does not count as ‘research software’ for the purposes of this survey.” We contacted 1,000 randomly selected researchers at each of 15 Russell Group universities. From the 15,000 invitations to complete the survey, we received 417 responses – a rate of 3% which is fairly normal for a blind survey. We used Google Forms to collect responses.

The responses have good representation from across the disciplines, seniorities and genders. This is a statistically significant number of responses that can be used to represent the views of people in research-intensive universities in the UK.

An overview of the data is available on the worksheet "Summary data". Responses to questions are ordered by unique respondent ID. Please read the "README" worksheet for additional information about the collection and processing of this data.

This survey data is licensed under a Creative Commons by Attribution licence. Copyright resides with The University of Edinburgh on behalf of the Software Sustainability Institute.