How many researchers are using software to analyse data?

I got asked that question by a colleague this morning, I did not give him the answer but I gave him a method to try and determine a guesstimate.

There are problems with estimating this apart from the fact we never thought about trying to answer the question so never kept proper records. Let me start unpicking the question and you will see the problems. I will work through them in the order they come in the question.

What do we mean by researchers?

This is a research intensive university but I bet you that nobody in the entire institution could tell you how many researchers we actually have. There are some numbers that are fairly easy to estimate. Academic staff are divided into Research Specialists, Research and Teaching, and Teaching  Specialists. So we just add up the Research Specialists and those employed in Research and Teaching.

Well given current employment data we might manage that box, but then there is a whole lot of staff who are crucial to research who are not on Academic grades. The lab technician who keeps the equipment running, people like me who are in Administrative grades but work with researchers etc. I am not sure that the University even knows how many of them are.  Then there are also emeritus staff.

Now those are staff but they are not all the researchers. There are also students. Every doctoral student of the University is also a researcher, anyone doing a Research Masters is also. However what of taught postgraduates and fourth year students doing research projects, are they researchers? Given that some PhD students are also employed by the University we need to be careful about double counting. While there are groups that are clearly researchers there are huge number of people who may or may not be a researcher.

What do we mean by software?

Many of you will have automatically thought of that as research software. There are some packages that easily spring to mind SPSS, Matlab, NVivo etc. These packages are used to deal with specific problems and to analyse data. These are the ones we have some ideas of user of.

However there are also, probably hundreds of packages that are used to analyse data in specialist fields. They are probably not widely used, but when you are talking about four or five people using each of hundred packages then you are talking between 400 & 500 users. Then there are packages which we would have no way of counting such as R, which is free software and one of the top statistical packages.


Those however are the obvious packages. What about the not so obvious ones? Such as Excel (there is some pretty serious data analysis done at this University using Excel). The problem is that I would guess that more people use Excel than all the other packages put together. You have some simple data, you do not want to do much so you put it in an Excel spread sheet and draw a graph. That is data analysis.Or take another example Mendeley, it claims to be a pdf and reference manager, but it has the tools in there to do a rudimentary analysis of texts. You can comment, tag, rate and organise your pdfs into folders. It certainly is possible to analyse your papers for your literature review, what's that papers are not data?

What do we mean by data?

The spreadsheet of data collected from a series of experiments, from conducting a survey or by other measurement technique are what people usually think of as data.

However there are huge lot of data used that do not fit that simple idea. A set of newspaper articles is a dataset, video and audio recordings of interviews, samples from corpora (collections of texts), pictures (both photographs and drawings), maps. All this is non-traditional data.

Here computers may even help us, they give a very neat definition of data. Data is anything that can be stored on a computer. Actually that is not quite correct, the data is the underlying computer coding but it gives a picture. This of course only deals with computer data but the extension can go on to real world data. Detailed handwritten notes of performances of pieces of music are data and data that almost could not be captured in any other way.

Basically all researchers handle data.

Applying this to a real example

I am writing up my thesis for another University and yes I am a doctoral student and yes I would be counted for a couple of tools that have been subsidiary analytic tools for my thesis but the main one. That is simple it is Word. The analytic part of my thesis has been through a process or writing and rewriting until I have something clear to say. Nothing particularly unusual about this, it is a common process in the arts and humanities. Perhaps I was slightly unusual because the doctorate is anthroplogical and that means that the basis for data collection is observation. So I knew I had collected data but data which was only in part recorded on paper, audio recording, video and photograph and which I relied heavily on my memory to recall. So how many researchers use Word as the tool for carrying out the analysis of their data?