ESRC Trusted AI Project Post-Doctoral Researcher -Sutherland Building, Newcastle upon Tyne, Tyne and Wear, NE1 8ST, GB
Salary: 41,064 - 46,049Work hours: Office Hours Monday to Friday, Full TimeJob Description
ABOUT THE ROLE
As a Research Associate, you will take a leading role in the project Trustworthy AI for Peer Review: Developing and Validating Composite Research Quality Indicators. Your work will focus on constructing high-quality REF-aligned corpora of research outputs, using and extending the full-text cache and metadata pipelines developed through our software: Macroscope. You will collect, clean, link, and document text and bibliographic data so that it can support rigorous testing of AI-assisted research assessment.
You will be responsible for developing reproducible data workflows that link REF2021 submissions, Units of Assessment, outcome profiles, institutional metadata, bibliographic records, abstracts, and, where licensing permits, full-text content. This will involve working with sources such as OpenAlex, Crossref, Unpaywall, Scopus and REF data,



designing robust extraction and matching methods, maintaining provenance and quality-control records, and producing well-structured datasets for downstream analysis.
The role will also contribute to the projects LLM-based evaluation work, helping to design, run, and analyse experiments that test how large language models perform in REF-style assessment tasks. This will include supporting prompt and model comparison, repeated-run evaluation, assessment of stability and disagreement, and analysis of potential biases or confounding effects. The post provides an opportunity to work at the frontier of trustworthy AI, research evaluation, scientometrics, and large-scale text infrastructure, with scope to publish, present, and help shape policy-relevant demonstrators.
The successful candidate will also have the opportunity to support in the development of Semantic Space, an Academic Intelligence company that suppo

📌 ESRC Trusted AI Project Post-Doctoral Researcher (Estella)
🏢 Northumbria University Newcastle
📍 Estella