Research syntheses are an increasingly used method in educational and behavioural sciences to gain an evidence-based overview of relevant aspects or topics. Evidence is due to the complete and systematic assessment and selection of relevant publications and structured synthesis of findings from literature. A multitude of approaches has been developed in this context occasionally involving AI tools. The project targets a standardization of the documentation of research syntheses and resulting heterogeneous data.
On the one hand, the project addresses researchers acting as data suppliers who are in need of support for transparent documentation and processing of FAIR data. Researchers will also be enabled to reuse other scientists’ research synthesis data. Research data thus need to be researchable so they can be assessed according to individual needs and used in the individual research settings.
ForSynData also addresses research data centres that curate and make available data in educational science and psychology and act as intermediaries between data givers – suppliers – and users of research syntheses.
The project is subdivided into four work packages that are coequally processed and run by DIPF and ZPID which focuses on research syntheses from psychology while DIPF focuses on syntheses from education.
First of all, a heuristic analysis will serve to assess relevant research syntheses from both disciplines – based on existing classifications found in the literature relating to different types. Reproducibility is checked. Criteria for reproducibility are geared towards research synthesis guidelines and the FAIR principles. The developed guidelines will be presented to focus groups of experts for evaluation purposes. Focus is placed on the comprehensibility of guidelines and the implementation of documentations with respect to assessing potentials of reusability – i.e. assessment of needs and data quality. Necessary metadata standards will be prepared for the final guidelines to sustainably curate research syntheses. Processing and documentation of guidelines will be linked to a close cooperation of staff at the research data centres involved. The metadata will be aligned to existing research data management standards – linking up to work by KonsortSWD, “Linking Textual Data”, “Open Data Format” and the NFDI section in charge of metadata. The final work package addresses an evaluation of processes for data publication and reusage involving research data centres as data curators and researchers as data suppliers of data and data users.
