Start Date: ASAP
Descriptions, Responsibilities, and Qualifications
This project offers an excellent opportunity for a University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign MSLIS student interested in metadata, data quality, database search, information retrieval and related topics. The incumbent will collect information about how well databases track retracted information, under the mentorship of Dr. Jodi Schneider, Assistant Professor and Director of the Information Quality Lab. The project will produce data analyses and reports to support a NISO Working Group in information gathering about how to improve metadata quality and display standards for retracted publications, in the Alfred P. Sloan foundation grant “Reducing the Inadvertent Spread of Retracted Science II: Research and Development towards the Communication of Retractions, Removals, and Expressions of Concern Recommended Practice”.
We will first search multidisciplinary databases (Scopus and Web of Science) as well as other sources (e.g., Crossref, Retraction Watch) for retracted publications. Then, we will compile a list of known retracted publications across these sources. We will compare across sources to identify retracted publications that have inconsistent information about whether or not they are retracted. We will also calculate which percentage of retracted publications indexed in the source are correctly indexed as retracted. We will then investigate how retractions are indexed in specific domain databases, using established retraction type indexing in biomedicine (PubMed, PubMed Europe)and psychology (PsycINFO), and investigating how retraced publications are indexed in chemistry (CAS SciFinder) and engineering (IEEE Xplore). We will also manually check indexing on a small dataset in search engines such as Google Scholar and Semantic Scholar.
Duties include:
- Searching databases
- Collating publication data
- Deduplicating publication data
- Documenting all aspects of the projects
- Producing project memos and reports
Required Qualification:
- Enrollment in the Master’s in Library and Information Science program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Interest in topics such as metadata, data quality, database search, etc.
- Interest in quantitative research using publications as data
- Detail orientation
- Excellent communication skills in written and spoken English
Preferred Qualifications:
- Available for continued work in spring 2023
- Project management experience
- Experience with quantitative data
- Experience in database searching
- Experience manipulating data using spreadsheet software (e.g., Excel) and/or scripting languages (e.g., R or Python)
- Interest in reproducibility and open science
- Interest or experience in writing research reports and/or publications
Compensation: paid as a graduate hourly through the University of Illinois, $20/hour for 10-15 hours a week.
Application Procedures: Interested candidates should send a cover letter and resume to Dr. Jodi Schneider in a single PDF file named Lastname-metadata-hourly.pdf to jodi@illinois.edu
Review of applications will begin immediately. Applications will be accepted until the position is filled. All applications received by Sunday October 2, 2022, will receive full consideration.
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