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DataLab

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Consultation, training, and collaborative services for the Feinberg School of Medicine

The DataLab is focused on collaborative innovation, training & development, and connecting faculty, staff, and students in the Feinberg School of Medicine to data-related resources here at Northwestern. Through our free DataClinic service, we provide consultation and training for all stages of the research data life cycle and link researchers with experts who can help to resolve issues. We engage the research community by teaching, hosting, and sponsoring training events and workshops that promote best practices related to data management, reproducibility, compliance with data sharing policies, and open science, as well as a range of associated technical topics. Our services and projects reflect our commitment to good data practices and a collaborative culture at Feinberg and beyond.

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What we do:

 
 

DataClinic

The Galter DataClinic employs a primary care model for data management and analysis. In addition to providing training and best practices support, we offer free consultations for researchers with data issues involving:

  • Collection & Management
  • Cleaning & Organization
  • Analysis
  • Visualization
  • Preservation

For long-term or specialized support, we refer researchers to our partners here at Northwestern. To request a Data Clinic consultation, please fill out the contact form

 

Data Education & Community Engagement

Through the DataLab and other university partners, Galter Library actively promotes best practices in research data management (RDM) to help foster creation and maintenance of reproducible and open scientific outputs. We also develop resources to serve as a reference for "just-in-time" information support for investigators looking for guidance on data-related issues.

For guidance on data management and sharing plans and compliance with the upcoming NIH Data Management and Sharing Policy, please see: Creating an NIH DMSP GalterGuide.

Our clinical data retrieval and management (cRDM) program for researchers offers training to enhance clinical data skills. See the link for more information on cRDM workshops and resources.

For a list of other classes, please visit the following links:

For more information on data-related topics, please visit the following GalterGuides:

 

Innovations

Galter Health Sciences Library and Learning Center is dedicated to building a collaborative clinical and translational research data infrastructure. Projects include:

  • InvenioRDM: a born-interoperable research data management repository and data catalog to enable best practices in research data management, sharing, and reuse. InvenioRDM makes it easy to collect, preserve, and disseminate a wide range of research products to enhance individual and institutional visibility, promote people and their expertise, support discovery and accessibility by the international scientific community, and promote open and FAIR science. We’re developing InvenioRDM in collaboration with CERN, other national and international partners, and Northwestern partners NUCATS and the Institute for Innovations in Developmental Sciences (DevSci).
  • CTS Personas: a portfolio of role-based profiles representing the translational workforce. Personas can help guide development of resources and services for the translational workforce, such as software, trainings, communication, and more.
  • Credit and Attribution: We are involved in variety of efforts including the Contributor Attribution Model, which provides a data model for representing information about contributions made to research products and the FORCE11 Attribution Working Group, an international collaboration to address issues related to contributor roles and better understanding of research processes and credit.
  • Clinical Research Data Management (cRDM) Program: Through a grant from the Network of the National Library of Medicine Greater Midwestern Region (NNLM-GMR) to support clinical data research workflows, the DataLab is developing an end-to-end training program that introduces clinical researchers to clinical database architecture and clinical coding standards, teaches them how to translate their research questions into queries that will allow them to extract data properly, and how to do so in a way that supports transparency and reproducibility while still respecting guidelines for proper data sharing. This grant bolsters resources and support for the Feinberg research community to use clinical research data from the Northwestern Medicine Enterprise Data Warehouses.
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Data-related Resources

For long-term or specialized support, please contact one of our Northwestern University partners. We have highlighted a few important links below:

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Contact DataLab

For questions about sharing your data and Data Management and Sharing plans, please contact researchdata@northwestern.edu. For other questions, please use the form below.

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Updated: September 25, 2023