How do academics work? How do they communicate? How do they analyse data? Does it differ between Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences (AHSS) avs Science, Technology and MedMath (STEM) . Lets see

Recently we saw a (to me anyhow) fascinating study emerge, of how academics and researchers use various tools for analysis, communication and dissemination. This is available here. There is, apparently, an online analysis tool but I have to confess whenever I try to use it it hangs.

So, I downloaded the data, and cleaned it up a little to answer the questions posed above. I merged postdocs and faculty into Academics, and concentrated on students, postgrad and academics. I also merged the faculties into two broad categories, AHSS and STEM This gave us 16,552 observations. Bear that in mind when looking at the results here. Bear also in mind that respondents were able to tick more than one option – so they can use say SPSS and Excel or search via Google Scholar and Web of Science. So four questions – what do we see in terms of searching, analysing, writing and measuring/communicating impact?

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So what jumps out at you? To me some points include