BPTW Academia Survey 2006 Methodology
The Scientist posted a Web-based questionnaire and invited readers of The Scientist and registrants on The Scientist web site who identified themselves as tenured or tenure-track life scientists working in academia or other non-commercial research organizations to respond. We received 1,623 usable responses. We asked respondents to assess their working conditions and environments by indicating their level of agreement with 39 criteria in 8 different areas. They also indicated which factors were important to them. We ranked 58 institutions from the US.
To calculate an institution's overall ranking, we first weighted each factor based on the average importance score. Because several factors that ranked as important in the United States and Canada are valued less elsewhere and vice versa, we used different factor weightings to rank North American and non-North American institutions. The overall rankings are based on the average score per institution from all ...
