Survey 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 non-tenured life scientists working in academia or other non-commercial research organizations to respond. We received 3,086 usable responses. We asked respondents to assess their working conditions and environments by indicating their level of agreement with 44 criteria in 11 different areas. They also indicated which factors were important to them. We ranked 82 US institutions and 17 non-US with 5 or more responses.

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 USA are valued less elsewhere and vice versa, we used different factor weightings to rank the two groups of institutions. The overall rankings are based on the average score per institution from all respondents on all factors weighted...