PsyCuraDat: Development of user-oriented curation criteria for psychological reseearch data

Sharing research data in order to enable research synthesis, re-analysis or other methods of secondary data use are central for the ever-growing open science movement. In the context of replication crisis and ongoing efforts towards greater research integrity and standardization, this is particularly true for psychological science. Even though standards exist they are often tailored to the needs of the more data-intensive sub disciplines, scarcely used, and remain largely unknown to a more general population of researchers. To address these issues PsyCuraDat aims at the empirically driven development of a discipline-specific standard that does not only facilitate curation and reuse of psychological research data, but is also representative for all sub-disciplines. Initial steps were concerned with aggregating existing standards, gauging their potential as enablers for psychological research curation, as well as first studies querying the nature of necessary information and as to how existing standards meet those requirements. Furthermore, we investigated how contextual information might be structured to achieve maximum usefulness for psychological researchers. As an interim conclusion we found that, indeed, a clear, seamless data curation standard addressing psychology as a scientific discipline seems a sought-after desiderata. Moreover, our overall approach of enriching raw-data with formal and contextual information embedded into three levels of the psychological research process (construct level, operational level & process level) promises to be helpful in reusing datasets in a complete, yet concise, fashion. Finally, we will touch on how our findings thus far will inform a user-oriented and –validated standard of data curation. unknown