Introduce RSE as academic field of work?

[sdruskat]

I'm not sure if this is the best place to submit things to consider for future surveys. If there is a better place, please point me to it.

I've been looking at the 2022 results for World once again, and stumbled over the "Academic field of work" value for computer science. The value for "Field of education" where the field is specified in which the person has finished their highest level of education gives ~22% for CS. In comparison, the "Academic field of work" field records ~42% for CS. This would suggest that almost half of RSEs practicing Research Software Engineering in the academic field of Computer Science aren't themselves computer scientists, i.e., they develop software for computer science research.

This may be absolutely correct, and in fact I'm sort of such a person myself, but I'm wondering if the ~42% could also include RSEs who work as RSEs, full stop. This could include survey participants who don't usually work in a particular academic field (but in many different ones), as well as participants who see RSEng as their academic field of work, and given that this wasn't an option to choose, chose "Computer science" instead as the potentially most closely related field.

While these are assumptions gained through introspection, I'm wondering if a better way to record answers for "Academic field of work" would be to

• either include RSEng as academic field of work,
  or
• make the field multiple choice and re-word the question so that survey participants answer in which academic field(s) they have practiced Research Software Engineering. Additionally it may be helpful to let participants order the academic fields they've applied RSEng in by proportion (e.g., "worked in computer science the most, less in linguistics, and least in computational chemistry"). Or even let them distribute with fractions 🤯.

My gut feeling is that the second option may be the better one, as it doesn't work with the assumption that everyone will accept RSEng to be an academic field in the first place. Also cross-survey comparability is still somewhat preserved.