Data Curator

Description

Digital Science makes tools to accelerate the pace of scientific discovery. We're looking for a Data Curator to create high quality databases of research organizations, people, and programmes to support our Science Metrics business.

Your role will be to learn everything there is to know about the scientific community - about research programmes, universities, funding bodies, researchers, journals, and more - then you'll use that knowledge to craft the key datasets at the heart of science metrics. You'll need to understand, collate, load, then curate, ultimately creating databases that will be used to help research organizations to improve their operations.

Who are you? You're passionate about science, and about improving the way research is done. You understand how the research community operates, from funding, to the scientific method, to publication of results, all the way to measuring impact. You also live and breathe data - your first thought is about the role data plays in solving real-world problems, and you understand how to create databases that solve those problems. You like nothing better than to immerse yourself in a dataset to understand how it really ticks, where it can be trusted, where it's suspect, and how to improve it.

Key Responsibilities

Data Entry and Quality Assurance

• Take responsibility for acquiring and managing Metrics-related data, including the structure and membership of research organizations
• Serve as chief liaison and point person for contacts in higher education, government agencies and science philanthropies regarding organizational information required to support the Metrics business
• Work with Data Scientists, Developers and Data Engineers to interact with the data at a low level, using software tools to manually curate data
• Develop familiarity with the internal Digital Science systems that interrogate and modify databases, and become adept at using our systems
• Take responsibility for the quality of input data, whether in batch form or manual edits, along with output data such as exported datasets

Management and Communication

• Manage temporary staff during peak periods of manual data entry
• Liaise with internal (Digital Science), intra-corporate (Nature Publishing Group and other Macmillan businesses) and external contacts and domain experts to curate and optimize Digital Science Metrics data sets

Candidate profile

We like people who:

• are tenacious and creative problem solvers
• work hard, break hard problems into small, achievable pieces and focus on delivery
• are good communicators who enjoy discussion and argument

Ideal experience

• Experience performing data processing tasks such as ETL jobs, data entry, batch updates, etc
• Ideally, work experience within a science-oriented organization (as a technician, librarian, office manager or similar) is an advantage

About Digital Science

Digital Science provides software and information to support researchers and research administrators in their everyday work, with the ultimate aim of making science more productive through the use of technology. As well as developing our own solutions, we also invest in promising start-ups and other partners, working closely with them to help them realise their full potential.