Services We Offer
The IQSS Data Science Services (DSS) team supports researchers throughout the Harvard and MIT communities by helping them navigate challenges at every stage of the publication research process. Our team includes five consultants: Joshua Cetron, Noah Greifer, Jinjie Liu, Steven Worthington, and Dan Yuan. Collectively, we have expertise in Statistics, Machine Learning, Programming, High Performance Computing, Databases, Computer Science, Psychology, Political Science, Evolutionary Biology, and Economics.
We offer three services to the Harvard community:
1) Consulting
To receive help, please email us at the following address:
researchconsulting_support@help.hmdc.harvard.edu
Please provide the following information in the email:
1) Your full name.
2) Your role (e.g., graduate student, professor, postdoc, etc.).
3) Your affiliation (e.g., Psychology dept., Medical school, MIT Sloan, etc.).
4) A short description of the issue you would like help with.
5) (optional): any data and/or code relevant to the request (preferably as a zipped folder).
Consulting
We provide short-term support in the form of advice and strategies on overcoming bottlenecks in your research project. This service is free of charge for up to 3 hours of help (per publication) and is available to faculty, research associates, post-docs, grad students, visiting scholars, staff members, and undergraduates (for senior thesis) who are working on research that will be published (including dissertations). We aim to respond to consulting help requests within two business days. Specifically, we can help with the following:
- Research project planning: study design and tools
- Research data organization: sharing and secure storage
- Research data processing / cleaning
- Research programming (e.g., R, Python, Stata, SAS, SPSS, Matlab)
- Research code organization (e.g., Git, GitHub)
- Selection and interpretation of statistical methods
- Research data visualization
- Using high performance computing (e.g., FAS-RC, AWS)
Limitations: Please note, we do not provide support for coursework, dual purpose research (i.e., coursework that informs a publication), or consulting research/work.
Acknowledging us: To aid us in tracking the impact of our consulting service, we ask that you include a short acknowledgement in your publications and/or talks. You may wish to amend the following text to reflect the type of support you received (e.g., programming support).
“Statistical support was provided by data science specialist <consultant names>, at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Harvard University."
Please insert one or more <consultant names> from the following: Josh Cetron, Noah Greifer, Jinjie Liu, Steven Worthington, Dan Yuan. We encourage you to email your publication titles directly to researchconsulting_support@help.hmdc.harvard.edu, so we can include them in our list of research output.
Collaboration
We provide extended support over the lifecycle of a research project by embedding a data science specialist in your research team. We can design and implement a data analysis pipeline for many stages of your research project. We aim to respond to collaboration requests within two business days. Specifically, we can help with the following:
- Writing reproducible, version controlled code (R, Python)
- Data organization and cleaning
- Model estimation and post-estimation
- Visualization of raw data and model output
- Interpretation of results
- Writing methods and results sections of papers
- Responding to peer-reviews of our analyses
In return for this extended support, we ask for two things:
1) Authorship: The data science specialist who performs the work will receive author credit on all resulting research output (e.g., publications, talks, posters, documents).
2) Compensation: IQSS will receive compensation for time spent working on the project at a rate of $100 per hour.
Selection Process: We evaluate and select projects for collaboration on a case-by-case basis, based on our available time, our expertise in the area, the feasibility of the project being completed in a reasonable time frame, and our interest in the project.
Limitations: Please note, we cannot collaborate on research projects where the primary output is a sole-authored dissertation / thesis.
Analytical Tool Building
We can develop R code to implement your new statistical method or to automate parts of your analysis pipeline. This version controlled code will take the form of a set of R functions with accompanying tutorial and may optionally be bundled into a new R package with associated documentation. This service is free of charge. The R code / R package will be made publically available on the IQSS GitHub site, so that the broader research community can make use of it. You may wish to browse R packages we have previously helped develop. We aim to respond to analytical tool building requests within two business days. We can help with the following use-cases:
- Implement new statistical methods in an R package
- Develop generalized functions for a particular data analysis or cleaning task, with an accompanying tutorial
- Optimize existing code (i.e., make computationally more efficient)
- Port code from other languages (e.g., Stata) to R
Selection Process: We evaluate and select projects for analytical tool building on a case-by-case basis. In particular, when selecting we place great weight on how generalizable the code will be to other use cases, so as to offer the most benefit to the broader research community. We also take account of our available time and the feasibility of the project being completed in a reasonable time frame.
Limitations: Currently, this service is limited to building tools using the R programming language.