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Things You Learn from Skimming 1350 Academic Journal Articles
Thoughts on the usefulness of wastefulness
I’ve been working on a meta-analysis for the past several months. It’s been a doozy. It’s taken up an enormous amount of my time. And it will probably take me another year to complete, at least.
A meta-analysis is the workhorse of the psychological sciences — and really, just about any science, now that you have hundreds of thousands of researchers all doing their own thing. A meta-analysis is like a review, except it’s packed full of nutritious numbers to the point where it is ready to burst. The goal is to comb through other people’s research, record their numbers, and then compare and combine numbers across studies to see how they all fit into the big picture.
So, with that being said, I’m not going to throw numbers at you. I know. I know. Please breathe — you’re safe here. We all have deep trauma associated with math. I won’t trigger yours today. I’m not going to talk statistics; instead, I just want to talk about the experience of going through so many papers.
There aren’t many places where you get to see such a broad crush of humanity on display. Airports. Amusement parks. Crowded streets in Tokyo. Good parks, if you’re the kind of person who can sit patiently on a bench and observe…
