A research team can often benefit from incremental help to expand their knowledge and skills, to augment their collective skill set, and/or to accomplish analysis, coding, and organizational tasks. A research consultation and facilitation service can enable a research team to perform research using an expanded set of methodologies and skills, to accelerate research and complete deliverables in a more timely manner, and to expand the scope and amount of research pursued. These goals can be achieved with help from a research computing staff via consultation, facilitation, scripting, project and data management, and training.
Data Science and Research Computing Facilitation
Eligibility information is outlined below based on providers with offerings that are available to the entire Harvard community or a specific unit/appointment.
University-wide
Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Research Computing
TIERS
Tier: Initial Consultation
We provide short-term support (up to 3 hours per week) in the form of advice on 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., RCE, 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.
Tier: Training
Courses available:
- R Code Optimization Workshop
- Data Handling in Python Workshop
- Containerization Workshop
- Public Research Site Workshop
- Cluster related courses
Audience
Available to all research groups with FASRC account.
Service Provider
FASRC
Service Fee
None
Service Website
https://www.rc.fas.harvard.edu/services/data-science-research-facilitation/
Contact Information
Institute for Quantitative Social Science
TIERS
TIER 1: INITIAL CONSULTATION
IQSS provides short-term support (up to 3 hours per publication) in the form of advice on 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 method
- Research data visualization
- Using high performance computing (e.g., RCE, 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.
TIER 2: PEER PRE-REVIEW
In addition to DSS consultations, IQSS provides two services for draft papers prior to them becoming public, via the Alexander and Diviya Magaro Peer Pre-Review Program which includes:
- A detailed, constructive, anonymous peer review by a leading outside scholar incented to participate, with extremely fast turnaround (probably a few weeks)
- A full empirical replication by our internal team
This service is available for papers associated with a Harvard faculty PI.
TIER 3: TRAINING
Workshops available:
- R Introduction
- R Regression Models
- R Graphics
- R Data Wrangling
- Stata Introduction
- Python Introduction
- Python Web-Scraping
- Python Natural Language Processing
- Do Less Work by Using the Unix Shell
- Tidying Data with Python and OpenRefine
- Version Control with Git/GitKraken
- Text Analysis with Quanteda
- Introduction to Programming
- Data Science Tools
Audience
Available to social science researchers at Harvard. For research, needs to be sponsored by Faculty. For administration, needs to be sponsored by the responsible administrator.
Service Provider
Institute for Quantitative Social Science
Service Fee
None
Service Website
https://www.iq.harvard.edu/data-science-services
Contact Information
Contact Steve Worthington at help@iq.harvard.edu
Unit/Appointment-specific
Harvard Business School
TIERS
TIER 1: INITIAL CONSULTATION
HBS provides short-term support (up to 2 hours per project) in the form of advice on 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., RCE, AWS)
Limitations: Please note, we do not provide support for coursework, dual purpose research (i.e., coursework that informs a publication).
TIER 2: COLLABORATION
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, and/or develop a prototype of your research focused software tool. Specifically, we can help with the following:
- Writing reproducible, version-controlled code (R, Python, C, C++)
- 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
- Developing tool prototypes in R / Python
Limitations: Please note, we cannot collaborate on research projects where the primary output is a sole-authored dissertation / thesis.
TIER 3: TRAINING
Workshops available:
- R Introduction
- R Regression Models
- R Graphics
- R Data Wrangling
- Stata Introduction
- Python Introduction
- Python Web-Scraping
- Python Natural Language Processing
- Do Less Work by Using the Unix Shell
- Tidying Data with Python and OpenRefine
- Version Control with Git/GitKraken
Audience
Available to all researchers at Harvard Business School. For research, needs to be sponsored by Faculty.
Service Provider
Harvard Business School
Service Fee
- Tier 1: Free
- Tier 2: $40/hour
- Tier 3: Free to members of HBS community
Service Website
https://inside.hbs.edu/Departments/rcs/Pages/default.aspx
Contact Information
Contact Bob Freeman at research@hbs.edu
Harvard Law School
Research design and general statistical services and consultation for faculty research projects including but not limited to statistical analysis of data, from identifying testable hypotheses, research design, consulting on validity and reliability.
Audience
School Faculty
Service Provider
Harvard Law School Library
Service Fee
None
Service Website
https://hls.harvard.edu/library/empirical-research-services/
Contact Information
Arevik Avedian
aavedian@law.harvard.edu
Harvard Medical School
Research Computing Consultants (RCCs) have computational experience as well as scientific training and provide facilitation to a wide range of activities. This allows them to work closely with researchers, understanding the scientific needs of their problems, and offer appropriate advice.
RCC consultations range from quick answers to deeper engagements that may involve multiple meetings over a few months. RCCs can also write small scripts to help in the data analysis or pipeline building, a level of engagement that might result in an acknowledgement in an article. When possible, RCCs – via workshops or 1-on-1 consultations– help researchers gain the skills to do these tasks independently.
The Research Data Management (RDM) team promotes research data management best practices and performs outreach, consultations, and trainings to help researchers manage research data throughout the lifecycle. The RDM team collaborates with other HMS IT groups to maintain documentation for research data management and HMS storage offerings, and to provide access to self-service storage usage tools to help on-Quad groups manage short and long-term data storage and management needs.
Audience
Anyone with an HMS Account (aka eCommons Account) can request RCC facilitation.
Due to resource constraints, RCCs only rarely become involved in full research collaborations, to the extent of becoming paper authors.
Due to resource constraints, the Research Data Management (RDM) team works primarily with researchers from labs whose PIs have a primary or secondary faculty appointment in an HMS Quad department.
Service Provider
HMS
Service Fee
TBD
Contact Information
Contact Amir Karger at rchelp@hms.harvard.edu (RCC)
Contact Jessica Pierce at rdmhelp@hms.harvard.edu (RDM)