We are prepping for a new PhD candidate position for the team. Since we are more in the planning phase of things, this is not a formal job opening (yet). We are currently looking more into what type of individuals would like to join the team, in order to have the final job description be a bit more clear. Since this is not grant money, there is no fixed project, and thereby no fixed job description. The candidate could jump onto one of the following projects, but own ideas and interests are very welcome, especially at this planning stage.
- Jurisprudence for research integrity platform
The candidate will initially work on setting up-up and subsequently analyzing an open and searchable jurisprudence database for research integrity. This database will include all ~500 outcomes of investigations into scientific misconduct in the Netherlands and will grow with ~50 cases per year. The candidate will work with various disciplines (lawyers, data scientists) to qualitatively and quantitatively analyze clusters and patterns over time with varied methodologies ranging from expert interviews, surveys to natural language processing both in isolation as well as mixed-methods. These analyses, together with a description of landmark cases will form the jurisprudence platform that will be used during future investigations of scientific fraud. - Differences in data handling and analysis
Many meta-research projects that look to whether methodologies and statistics are used correctly focus on analyses of publications or existing databases of research output. The individual researcher is often hard to reach, and those that do participate in this type of research are not likely to be representative. The candidate will execute several smaller subprojects that combine principles of “many analyst” and “multi-verse analysis” approach to study the use and misuse of methods and statistics in some selected medical specializations. The lessons learned hopefully lead to the development of a platform that is designed to lower the threshold of participation and thus increase representativeness. - Authors behind retractions
There are various papers describing the frequency and some characteristics of scientific articles that were retracted from literature. The focus is less often on the people behind those retractions. Can we distinguish the culprits from the innocent bystanders? What are the causes and consequences of retractions for the individual researcher? Are there differences between various scientific fields? The candidate will approach these questions with the various epidemiological tools and study designs that we have at our disposal.
Some provisional requirements and other details
| Open from: | Jan 1st 2022 at the earliest. Please get in touch. |
| Open to: | People who hold (or almost hold) a MSc degree in relevant disciplines, which include -but are not limited- to biomedical sciences, medicine, biology or even law. Although no formal requirement, some experience with quantitative research and knowledge of open science practices are welcomed |
| Language: | For some subprojects it is pivotal to be fluent in both Dutch (mother tongue or at least C1) and English (mother tongue or at least C1). |
What we offer – The QI activities are driven by a small interdisciplinary team of researchers and policy makers from the medical sciences. Evidence driven, we aim to improve the way we do science through research and policy changes through collaboration with numerous researchers from within and outside the LUMC. For this project, we team up with prof dr. Frits Rosendaal (LUMC, co-chair CWI Leiden) and dr. Yvonne Erkens (Leiden Law School, co-chair CWI Leiden). The research of the team is formally embedded within the department of clinical epidemiology (dr Bob Siegerink / Frits Rosendaal). Take a look at our relative new OSF page of our activities – https://osf.io/2syfm/ and https://osf.io/ku9rh/ for more information.
Interested? Please get in touch with primary supervisor Bob Siegerink (b.siegerink@lumc.nl / bobsiegerink.com / @bobsiegerink). If interested, please send a short motivational statement, and perhaps a short resume that outlines your educational background, research experience as well as relevant software skills. Your responses will help us to further define the roles/activities and corresponding requirements of the new candidate in the team.
bob siegerink 