Methodology

This report is based on a survey of 157 respondents from 18 countries around the world.

The survey was fielded from 28 November, 2022 to 5 January 2023.

The median time spent on the survey is 10.52 minutes. The mean time spent on the survey for qualified responses was 22:35 minutes and this is much higher than the median because of some extreme outliers (116 and 1678 minutes). The majority of respondents spent around 10 minutes on the survey, see the distribution below.

The majority of respondents filled out the survey on a desktop (63%), a portion used a phone (37%) and one person used a tablet.

Respondents were recruited primarily through the following channels

• Bits in Bio Slack Channel

• LinkedIn through posts by Bits in Bio, Cradle, Benchling

• Twitter through people such as

  • Nicholas Larus-Stone
  • Jelle Prins
  • Vega Shah

• Reaching out to different Biotech outlets

Respondents didn't receive a tangible incentive, so those who started and finished the survey are most likely highly engaged in the goals that we shared in our announcements (see an example on Cradle's website), summarised as to:

• Better understand the community of people working in biology and software.

• Learn about the tools and resources people use so we and others working on life sciences software can create better software for the life sciences.

• Attract attention, talent and funds to this important vertical of software for the life sciences.

We encourage everyone who works in the life sciences or on software for the life sciences to participate and make their voice heard here.

Many questions were only shown to respondents based on their previous answers. For example, questions about jobs and work were only shown to those who said they were working in a job.

Free form text responses are primarily used to influence future survey choices but are not included in the published results.