$40–70/hr · Mercor · Hourly, 40 hours a week
Conduct comprehensive information retrieval across academic humanities webpages with high precision and recall.
What you would do
- Search across webpages to locate relevant information in humanities subjects including history, philosophy, and linguistics
- Evaluate source credibility and determine whether content truly addresses the research topic
- Synthesize findings across multiple related domains to provide comprehensive coverage
- Apply rigorous standards to distinguish on-topic material from tangentially related pages
- Document selection reasoning and maintain consistency in inclusion criteria
Who they want
- PhD, professor, or researcher with deep expertise in at least one humanities field
- Demonstrated ability to search effectively and recognize nuanced topic distinctions
- Strong research methodology background with experience evaluating source credibility
- Academic background in history, philosophy, linguistics, sociology, political science, economics, fine arts, media, or literature
- Comfort with extended research projects requiring hours of focused attention to detail
What the interview asks about
1.Recognizing subtle topic boundaries
AI models learn relevance partly from human judgment, so incorrectly including tangential content trains the system to conflate different concepts.
For example: “You find a page about 17th-century philosophy and epistemology that mentions social hierarchies once but focuses on knowledge theory. Would this pass your relevance filter for a search on the history of class structures, and why?”
2.Finding hard-to-locate sources
High recall requires creative search approaches, not just obvious keyword combinations, since early results often miss specialized publications and niche archives.
For example: “Your search for contemporary art criticism across Eastern European contexts has yielded only mainstream galleries. Describe three strategies you'd try to surface lesser-known regional publications.”
3.Assessing source authority
Training data quality depends on excluding biased or unvetted sources, so evaluating academic rigor and potential agendas is as important as finding relevant pages.
For example: “You find two sources on the 1789 revolution: one from a university press and one from a self-published blog both discussing causes. How would you assess their credibility differently?”
4.Documenting research decisions
Reproducibility requires that others understand your reasoning, so vague inclusion criteria create inconsistency and make it hard to refine search workflows.
For example: “Explain the criteria you'd document for a search on 'postcolonial literature and identity' that would let another researcher understand why you included some sources but rejected others.”
A task you may get
Given a humanities research topic, conduct a 30-minute web search to locate at least 15 relevant sources, document your search strategy and source selection reasoning, and list any searches that yielded only tangential results.
How to prepare
- Refine your expertise in one humanities domain and practice articulating its key concepts and debates
- Study academic databases and specialized search techniques beyond standard search engines
- Review examples of topic-specific relevance boundaries to understand how precision differs across disciplines
- Practice documenting your search reasoning and source evaluation criteria
The facts
- Pay
- $40–70/hr
- Hours
- Hourly, 40 hours a week
- Where
- Remote
- Field
- Humanities
- Project name
- X-ray
- Posted
- 8/12/2026
- Places left
- 84
We wrote this page from the public Mercor listing. It may be out of date, so read the full posting before you apply.