Tag Archives: Data analysis

Data analysis of Bioinformatics Career Survey

Michael Barton did a great job of collecting and cleaning data for First Bioinformatics Career Survey. Raw results are available at Github and please read also details on the analysis and sharing results over at OWW page.

Michael encouraged to go wild with an analysis, so here’s my quick look at the data. On the image above you can see a scatter plot of salary vs years in the field (top), histogram of salaries (bottom left), histogram of planned years in the field and histogram of positions (bottom right). All plots are colored according to the positions.

There some obvious things in these graphs, such as correlations between position and salary or between years in the field and position (see also the video below). But what strikes me is the plot showing estimated number of years in the field. There are some local maxima at around 5, 20 and 30 years, but its very interesting to see that ca. half of the people see themselves in bioinformatics for another 25-30 years and longer, and there’s no clear correlation between positions of these people and these predictions (other than senior/PI-level staff doesn’t like an idea of working for another 30-40 years). The reason I find it interesting is that I have no idea how bioinformatics will look like in these 20-30 years (and that was the reason I’ve put conservative 5 years in this field). Do you know? Do you have an idea how bioinformatics will look like so much time ahead?