Paper Writing Opportunity: Paradata and Public Health

TheCedarPrince
Sat, 30 Aug 2025 01:03:54 +0000
Offtopic

Hi folks,

I have currently been working with my close collaborator Nathaniel Osgood on a review type paper at the intersection of applied mathematics and public health. As we were writing, we realized there was another smaller contribution we could make discussing paradata in the context of public health. While not the priority of our collaboration, we both realized writing a smaller paper filling this gap in literature could be helpful!

Here is some information

Background: Paradata can be roughly defined as “data about processes”. Paradata overlaps conceptually with metadata but is distinct enough to be thought of as its own concept.

Examples:

The video conference provider you are using when conducting surveys

The guidelines one is following when recording study information

The method (or process) used to prepare and report viral load data from wastewater sewage monitoring

Need: We would like to write a small paper discussing paradata’s presence in public health work – specifically,
epidemiological modeling of disease (using approaches such as
compartmental models, agent-based modeling, or differential equation based approaches) or public health monitoring (such as electronic health record analyses) papers. We would also like to potentially show worked code examples of where poor handling of paradata could impact downstream results or decisions. The coding would most likely be rather straightforward and small, self-contained examples.

Target Venues: While nothing is set in stone yet, some potential target journals could be:

Information Research

Journal of Information Science

Journal of Medical Internet Research

Journal of Documentation

Fields for potential readership could be around information science and library sciences.

Timeline: Nothing specific at the moment!

Over the course of the last few months, I have generated a bunch of notes on paradata and Nate also has several notes on paradata and relevant examples within public health. Now, we would just be curious if anyone would want to work with us on a paper using the materials we have already prepared and also develop some examples/visualizations to explain this problem space.

If any of this sounds interesting or you have any more questions, feel free to comment below or DM me here or on Slack!

Thanks all!

~ tcp

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