Job: Data Scientist (Research Assistant) – Scholarly Communications Lab | ScholCommLab

The Public Knowledge Project (PKP) and the Scholarly Communications Lab (ScholCommLab) at Simon Fraser University are looking for a research assistant to work on the Metadata for everyone: Identifying and measuring metadata quality issues across cultures starting as soon as possible and no later than September 30, 2022.  Metadata is a vital aspect of academic publishing. It ensures accurate identification and citation of a work. It can improve discoverability, access, dissemination, preservation, and, arguably, research impact. It can help disambiguate similar works. However, despite its importance, little is known about the quality of the metadata that is currently in use, and the impacts of poor metadata have rarely been studied. This project will therefore explore the metadata quality, consistency and completeness from various individual journals and communities. The project will pay special attention to elements that are most likely to vary across cultures, such as names and those that are potentially multi-lingual, with the understanding that metadata issues do not affect nor impact all communities in the same way. Full details of the project can be found here: https://bit.ly/pkp-scl-metadata. The Research Assistant will assist in “Phase 2” of the project. This phase will build upon the sample analysis in phase 1 and will include big-data analyses to quantify the completeness, inconsistencies, and idiosyncrasies found in publication metadata as well as attempts to automate heuristics to identify and/or resolve these issues.