Our latest poll has just closed,
and the results are quite interesting. We asked three questions:
1) Have you bought fragments in
the past few years?
2) Which of the following vendors
would you RECOMMEND?
3) Which of the following vendors
would you AVOID?
First, a paragraph on methodology.
The poll ran from November 3 through December 7. Due to the limitations of the
free version of Crowdsignal (formerly Polldaddy), I have no way of knowing how
many individuals responded to questions 2 or 3 (respondents could choose
multiple answers). This was the purpose of question 1; 37 people answered yes,
and 12 people answered no. Assuming that only people who answered yes answered
questions 2 and 3, I divided the responses to questions 2 and 3 by 37 to give
percentages. So for example, 33 people would recommend Enamine, which is 89%. If
some people who answered no to question 1 answered 2 and/or 3, or answered
questions 2 and/or 3 but not 1, the percentages may be overestimates. This
seems possible, as the total number of people who would recommend or avoid
Enamine adds up to 36. So either nearly everyone who said they bought fragments
did so from Enamine, or more people responded than were accounted for by answering
“yes” to whether they purchased fragments.
The results are shown here.
The first thing that jumps out is
the popularity of Enamine – which is recommended by nearly 90% of respondents.
Life Chemicals, Maybridge, ChemBridge, and Key Organics are each recommended by more than 30%,
while Vitas-M, ChemDiv, and Asinex are each recommended by 16-24% of respondents.
Seven other vendors were recommended by 2 or fewer respondents.
The second observation is that, for the most
part, people seem fairly happy with their vendors: each named vendor would be
avoided by fewer than 10% of respondents. That said, the relative numbers vary
considerably: only one respondent would avoid Life Chemicals, while 18 would
recommend them. In contrast, for some of the less popular suppliers, the number
of people who would avoid them was comparable to the number who would recommend
them.
Finally, I was pleased to see
that although a few respondents selected “other” for vendors they would
recommend, these were outnumbered by the number selecting “others” they would
avoid. That suggests the list provided in the poll captured most trusted vendors. That said, there
is no way of knowing whether, for example, the 7 respondents who chose to
recommend “other” vendors all had the same vendor in mind, or up to 7 different
ones.
Of course there are caveats (and
more in the methodology section above). First, the response rate is lower than
most of our other polls, reflecting the fact that library generation is not
something done lightly or frequently. Second, the first question was
deliberately vague; people may have different definitions of “past few years,” and
some vendors may have improved or deteriorated. Third, we have no way of
knowing how many organizations are represented; if many people responded
from a single company this could bias the results. Fourth, we are dependent on
the honesty of respondents – we don’t know whether vendors recommended
themselves.
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