Social Science Research Tools: metaBus (One Million Quantitative Findings Across 25 Years of Research, 20+ Journals)

From Rice University:

metaBUS is search engine containing more than a million quantitative findings across 25 years of research and 20-plus journals related to the fields of management, including human resource management and organizational behavior, and psychology, including industrial-organizational and personality. Students and faculty using metaBUS can search over 4,000 topics that are hierarchically arranged. Broader topics, such as job performance and cognitive ability contain narrower ones, such as specific task performance and job knowledge.

[Fred] Oswald, [an organizational psychologist and professor at Rice University] has been involved in developing and refining metaBUS topics, and he has provided the metaBUS team technical advice regarding the statistical method (meta-analysis) and graphics used to summarize research findings.
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[Frank] Bosco [a co-creator of MetaBUS] said, “Historically, we have had a bit of a ‘vocabulary problem’ in the social sciences – that is, the same ‘thing’ being studied can go by dozens of different names. Employee performance, for example, can be called a ‘supervisor rating’ or ‘number of homes sold’ and the like. If you really want to locate all relevant information on a given topic, it’s difficult to come up with all the terms you’ll need. That’s why classification systems are so valuable: Rather than coming up with all possible search terms, one may select a ‘branch’ of a classification containing all variations of the term. Having these classifications with research findings tied to them allows scientists to ask metaBUS larger ‘big science’ types of research questions.”

Learn More about metaBUS, Read the Complete Article
Direct to metaBUS
See Also: Review of metaBUS Features
See Also: Next Steps for metaBUS

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