Discovering research data management trends from job advertisements using a text-mining approach

Abstract

In today’s data-driven culture, research data management (RDM) is essential for the research community. The demand for reusing research datasets is a challenging and diverse process for the scientific community. Despite this, it is essential in RDM to discover trends and themes using text mining, which is scarce. The purpose of this study is to employ text mining to discover insights from job advertisements associated with RDM profiles, which collected 810 advertisements. We found RDM-related patterns using latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) and identified three key contexts. The first is ‘research services in libraries’, with the topics of research services, research information, research universities, collection processes and library services. The second context is ‘research data’, which includes RDM, business data, university data, research data, health research, science research, social science research, data centres, data services, statistical software, digital scholarship and digital preservation. The third context is ‘workplace environment’, and the topics are leadership, work development and scientific position. Job title normalisation reveals names such as ‘data librarian’, ‘librarian’, ‘director’, ‘data curator’, ‘data manager’, ‘research data librarian’, ‘data specialist’ and ‘data officer’ are frequently employed. Focusing on titles with a single or double occurrence is new and interesting for developing nations. Reputable institutions such as Harvard, Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as well as countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Germany, are the major participants in RDM practises and services. This discovery will assist higher education institutions, RDM stakeholders, which aid in the formulation of curriculum, and job seekers to familiarise themselves with the themes.