The Researcher's Guide to Biotech Research Transcriptions

If the COVID-19 vaccine taught us anything, it’s that the biotech research industry is progressively advancing at a fast pace. While this signals a positive growth in how quickly we can develop new technologies, it also spells a recurring challenge for research firms. How do you maintain research quality and workflow efficiency at the same time?

The answer: biotech research transcriptions.

Maintaining efficiency and precision in research processes is paramount in the modern biotechnology landscape. This is where audio transcriptions can come in and take research and development to the next level.

Here’s everything you need to know about biotech research transcriptions and their significance in finding your next breakthroughs in research.

Definition of Biotechnology Research Transcription

Biotechnology research transcription is the process of converting audio and video dialogues into text. Transcripts, which are the resulting document, feature timestamps and speaker identification, which unlock more profound insights from the discussion.

There are three main types of transcription, differentiated by how much of the audio is transcribed:

1. Pure verbatim transcription: Captures every utterance, including filler words and false starts. Provides a complete picture of the discussion.
2. Intelligent verbatim transcription: Excludes filler words, false starts, and background noises. Focuses on the discussion while maintaining clarity.
3. Non-verbatim transcription: Extracts core ideas from discussions, offering a streamlined rendition without reproducing every spoken word.

Biotech research transcription utilizes various forms of transcriptions, including:

• Market research transcription - Includes focus groups and interview transcriptions to identify and measure consumer preferences, product insights, and competitive analysis.
• Meeting notes transcription - Creates transcripts that convert into meeting minutes, enabling effective collaboration and decision-making.
• Conference call transcriptions - Converts the conference call discussions into transcripts to streamline the dissemination of information.

How Transcription Can Benefit Your Biotech Research

In the realm of biotech research, the symbiotic relationship between advancements and challenges is constant. Among these challenges, transforming raw discussions into actionable insights stands out. Market research is a cornerstone where discerning consumer preferences, identifying new product pathways, and understanding competitive landscapes are pivotal. Yet, extracting these insights from audio files presents hurdles that can stall progress.

Complexity thrives within these audio archives, with crosstalk, accents, and background noises often obscuring clarity. Lengthy recordings, typical in qualitative research, demand substantial time for analysis. The search for critical information within these recordings can be akin to finding needles in haystacks. This is where market research transcription shines as a transformative solution, offering many benefits tailored to the evolving landscape of biotech research.

In biotech research, breakthroughs and innovations become increasingly challenging to achieve. Creating meaningful advancements requires facilitating numerous discussions over consumer insights, competition, and next steps. Hence, market research is pivotal in biotech research, as firms must rely on trends to identify:

• Consumer preferences
• What new products to develop
• How to improve a currently existing product
• Where they stand with the competition

But for such discussions to be fruitful, they must be transformable into actionable insights that are easily accessible.

Usually, researchers record the audio of the discussions for later reference. While audio recordings can be reliable, it may be challenging to utilize them due to challenges such as:

• Complex audio - Crosstalk, thick accents, and background noise can make it difficult to understand the discussion.
• Length of the discussion - Long audio recordings can be tedious to listen to, especially if there are multiple speakers to consider.
• Finding key insights - Listening to the entire recording can be time-consuming to extract the necessary wisdom from the discussion.

Market research transcription is necessary to solve these challenges. Here are some of the benefits of market research transcription to biotech research:

More streamlined research process

Your research group may experience disagreement or misinterpretation of crucial data points, which can be resolved by referring to the audio recordings. However, this can consume a lot of time in the face of differences in comprehension, especially if there are multiple audio recordings.

Transcripts can save a significant amount of time in clarifying misunderstandings. You can use the search function to look up the keyword or phrase and navigate quickly to the insight. In addition, you can easily highlight, copy, and share passages from the transcript with your research group to clearly and promptly resolve misinterpretations.

Enhanced understanding of the discussion

Market research transcription grants the ability to extract more critical insights from the audio recordings of qualitative research methods. For instance:

• Type of transcription - You can create your transcripts based on your current research needs. Pure verbatim transcription can provide more nuanced insights through both the discussion and auditory responses of the speakers. Intelligent verbatim transcription omits unnecessary utterances and sounds while staying faithful to the discussion. Non-verbatim transcription can save time by being less precise in transcribing the dialogue's actual words while retaining the discussion's main ideas.
• Textual version of the recorded discussion - Transcripts are very convenient for analysis, as you can easily read them anywhere and share vital insights with teammates by copying and pasting text. In comparison, listening to the recordings requires headphones and a quiet environment to understand the discussion clearly.
• Speaker labeling - Transcripts feature speaker labels that make associating specific insights with their respective speakers easy.  This is especially beneficial when transcribing a recording with multiple speakers or low audio quality.

Better accessibility to research

Your market research data is beneficial not only to your current team but to the entire research firm. For instance, other teams in your organization may use that information to design new projects.

However, they may be too preoccupied with their projects to listen to audio recordings of your focus groups or interviews. On the other hand, transcripts allow them to extract insights more quickly because of the following reasons:

• Transcripts are more shareable than audio recordings. They have a much smaller file size, which makes them faster and easier to share.
• You can create video captions out of the transcripts. Captioning makes the insights in your video or audio recordings significantly more accessible.
• Non-native speakers can keep up. Some organization members may have a limited aptitude for the dominant language of the discussion. Having a transcript allows them to understand the discussion at their own pace.

Guiding future research

Trends in the biotech industry are often fast and fleeting. For a research firm to keep up, it has to stay on its toes by constantly creating new projects. Making projects from scratch is substantially challenging; instead, past research is utilized as a foundation for creating new projects.

And to further streamline the initial stages of the project, researchers use summaries of past research. Fortunately, transcripts contain raw qualitative data that can be quickly navigated and shared. In addition, they provide the full context of the discussion. This makes them ideal for setting out your following line of projects.

Which Biotech Industry Sectors Can Benefit From Transcription?

The biotech industry, in general, can leverage transcription to enhance and streamline research efforts. To illustrate, here are five biotech sectors that can benefit significantly from transcriptions:

1. Pharmaceutical
2. Agricultural
3. Medical devices
4. Cosmetics
5. Veterinary

1. Pharmaceutical

In an industry propelled by innovation, pharmaceutical companies leverage transcription for swift comprehension of market dynamics. Transcripts expedite assessments of optimal marketing strategies, identification of high-demand drugs, and comprehensive analyses of competitive offerings.

The pharmaceutical industry has grown substantially since 2021 due to research efforts in producing vaccines for the COVID-19 virus. Globally, the industry earned $1.42 trillion, making it one of the most competitive sectors in biotech research.

Companies in the pharmaceutical sector face challenges like economic trends and prevalent diseases (e.g., COVID-19) when producing new drugs.

Transcription allows them to have reference materials that can quickly be navigated and shared among team members for swift comprehension of current market dynamics. Transcripts expedite assessments of optimal marketing strategies, identification of on-demand drugs, and in-depth analyses of competitive offerings.

2. Agricultural

The agricultural sector is highly competitive, with a projected $27 billion increase in market size from 2021 to 2026. Typical customers include both private and public farms and plantations that contend vigorously against rival companies.

Since agricultural biotechnology requires precise genetic engineering and yield optimization, biotech research firms can better identify clients’ current needs using transcriptions. Transcripts of focus group discussions, interviews, and conference calls provide researchers with better insights on achieving:

• More efficient farming methods
• Beneficial modifications of living organisms (genetically modified organisms or GMOs)
• Improved fertilizers
• Better crop protection
• Higher crop yields

3. Medical devices

The target market for medical devices involves both consumer and business-level customers. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the medical device market’s total revenue was reduced by a significant amount between 2019 and 2020, with some companies experiencing a revenue decline of up to 19%. However, there has been a gradual increase in the following years after 2020, signifying a returning interest in the development of medical devices.

To take advantage of the surge, industrial biotechnology companies must immediately initiate research efforts to leverage consumer trends and demands. Transcription can streamline the research process by allowing researchers to gather more insights from focus groups and interviews.

With a growing interest in consumer-level medical devices, discussions on this topic are lengthy and complex. Transcripts can be very useful for researchers by allowing them to search and highlight key points in the discussion.

For instance, some current consumer demands include:

• Development of more advanced wearable devices for better accuracy and convenience
• Increased production of medical devices designed for monitoring biological processes and chronic diseases in the body
• Consideration of portability as a factor when developing new medical devices

4. Cosmetics

“Biocosmetics” is an emerging cosmetics niche where biotechnology is leveraged to create cosmetic products with more natural ingredients (as opposed to chemicals). The main challenge of firms engaging in biocosmetics is identifying which products in their existing catalog have the most demand for the transition to natural ingredients.

Transcription can substantially benefit researchers, as discussions on this subject are usually long and broad, especially if the client companies offer a wide range of cosmetic products.

Some examples of trends in cosmetics that necessitate transcriptions for better insights include:

• Eco-friendly materials for clothing
• Quality assurance of products without requiring animal testing
• Fossil fuel alternatives for ingredients in cosmetic products (e.g., makeup)

5. Veterinary

By 2050, the human population is projected to reach 9.15 billion. This will increase demand for improved food security, quantity, and quality in developed and developing countries. Thus, the current trends in the veterinary sector revolve around more sustainable and efficient animal production methods than traditional breeding programs.

However, there are other factors that researchers must consider, such as animal diseases, time-specific livestock demands, and animal pedigree. These often vary based on client needs and consumer trends.

Thus, with focus groups and interviews tending to be in-depth, transcriptions can condense vital qualitative data and insights into a readable form. Transcripts also provide a more sustainable approach to producing future veterinary research projects, which is necessary due to the complexity of animal husbandry.

Some key veterinary trends that transcription can help you better understand include:

• Genome analysis and eugenics to decrease the likelihood of genetic disorders during breeding
• Advancements in molecular biology to achieve long-term, high-quality livestock production for ecological balance
• Improved animal food and drug safety assurance

Types of Events Where Biotech Researchers Can Use Transcriptions

You can use transcriptions in various scenarios related to biotech research. The benefits of transcripts can vary depending on the event. For instance, some transcripts can help you gather critical insights, while others can exist solely for recordkeeping or reference purposes.

Some scenarios include:

• Training sessions - Transcriptions preserve knowledge transfer during training, aiding in tracking the progress of new researchers
• Team meetings - Transcriptions allow researchers to share meeting recordings in the form of tangible records, minimizing confusion and supporting informed decisions
• Interviews - Transcribing interviews of research respondents can be helpful for in-depth insights into consumer trends
• Conference calls - The decision-making process of executives in a research firm can be more accessible throughout the entire organization with transcripts
• Seminars - Large-scale biotech conventions and open forums can provide insights that transcripts can capture more clearly for reference in future team projects

Other Types Of Transcription Services The Biotech Industry Can Use

When research projects become very busy, researchers are unable to record and transcribe the recordings themselves without sacrificing time and energy. Instead of sacrificing quality and accuracy to produce transcripts quickly, you can hire a transcription provider instead.

Transcription providers can create transcripts for clients after receiving the audio recording and any formatting specifications. Many providers offer various transcription services, including market research transcriptions.

Automated speech-to-text services may be seen as a better alternative to human transcribing services due to their faster delivery time. However, they fall short in terms of flexibility and accuracy, both crucial in biotech research.

Transcription providers can also offer other types of transcription services that biotech researchers can utilize to enhance their workflow, such as:

• Transcription editing - Professional transcriptionists can edit automated transcripts by clearing out grammatical errors and ensuring that the dialogues in the recordings are captured accurately in the transcripts 
• Meeting minutes - Some transcription providers offer meeting minutes services along with their transcripts to accelerate comprehension and decision-making
• Closed captioning - Video recordings of interviews and focus groups can be significantly more accessible to your organization if they contain captions
• Translation - International biotech firms can benefit significantly from services offering transcripts in multiple languages. Translated transcripts can make crucial insights much more accessible among organization members.

What To Look For In A Transcription Provider For Biotech Research

If you decide that a human transcription provider best suits your research needs, your next step would be to research and compare the different providers available. Some providers are better than others. Accuracy and quality are just two of the factors to consider when choosing the right provider.

You should use other criteria to determine the best transcription provider. These include:

• General versatility and expertise - The ideal provider must be able to transcribe your meetings, focus groups, and other research methods.
• Proficiency in biotech terminology- The service provider should have transcribers who can identify and transcribe biotech terms and jargon in real-time
• Data security and compliance - Biotechnology research primarily concerns sensitive research data. Thus, it’s crucial to confirm the provider's compliance with data privacy regulations like GDPR to safeguard research integrity
• Delivery time flexibility - The service provider must be as agile as your research needs. At the very least, they must provide rush transcript offerings to match your turnaround time
• Pricing structure - The rates should align with your research budget

Conclusion

With the fast and fickle biotech trends, transcription is not just an added convenience to the research process — it is instrumental in finding success for your next biotech breakthrough. Hence, your research firm must consider adding transcription as one of their vital tools in gathering and maximizing critical insights for their research projects.