How many RSEs in the world?

Good question... very good question. There's lots, certainly, but that feels too unscientific. Is there a way to estimate the number of RSEs in the world? That's the point of this very quick investigation.

Files

• association-members.csv
  • Members of the UK RSE Association when it closed in July 2020
• global_researchers.csv
  • Number of researchers in different countries. From the OECD website
  • Downloaded on 19 October 2020.
• hesa_number_of_researchers_uk.csv
  • 'Staff numbers by HE provider'. From the HESA website
  • This data is messy. You're expecting just the data, but you get the data + extra summaries of the data that seems to be used for the responsive viewing of the data on the HESA website.
  • Downloaded on 15 October 2020
• oecd_country_codes.csv
  • A list of all the countries and short country codes used to make the OECD data more readable. From the ISO website.
  • Downloaded on 16 October 2020.
• population.csv
• The population of different countries. From the OECD website
• Downloaded on 19 October 2020.
• research_spending.csv
  • OECD data on the Gross domestic spending on R&DTotal, Million US dollars, 2018 – 2019 across different countries. From the OECD website.
  • Downloaded 19 October 2020.
• rse_groups.csv
  • The size of 25 UK RSE Groups.
  • Collected via interview by Simon Hettrick in January 2020.
• rse_like_jobs.csv
  • Data from a currently not-shared project investigating the number of RSE-like jobs in the UK comprising the fraction of jobs that are RSE-like from 2014 to 2020.
  • Downloaded 15 October 2020
• salary.csv
  • Average salary in different countries. From OECD website

What's it about?

I was asked to do a talk for SORSE. I chose to do it on the number of RSEs in the world, because I thought it'd be fun. It was. Apart from some of the data identification/cleaning.

The slides are on my Slides account.