MetaBUS as a vehicle for facilitating meta-analysis

metaBUS: A Tool for Informing HRD Theory, Practice, and Research

“…The data base has since increased to 13,057 articles as of May 2018 (metaBUS, ). These articles were retrieved from 28 journals related to management, human resources, organizational behavior, and applied psychology published 1990–2015 with two journals (Journal of Applied Psychology and Personnel Psychology) dating back to 1980 (F. A. Bosco, personal communication, September 4, 2017; Bosco, Uggerslev, & Steel, ).…”

“…The database presently does not contain articles from HRD related journals including Human Resource Development International , Human Resource Development Quarterly , and New Horizons in Adult Education and Human Resource Development . Plans for future growth of the database involve the inclusion of additional journals and expanding the date ranges of the current journals further into the past while keeping up with new publications (F. A. Bosco, personal communication, September 4, 2017; Bosco et al, ). A detailed list of journals that are currently included in the metaBUS database along with their impact factors to provide an idea of the quality of the metaBUS database can be found at http://profnimon.com/metaBUSjournals.pdf.…”

“…By being able to include child nodes or by only going with one specific term, the nested structure of the taxonomy that becomes more specific as it branches out allows for a very precise search. The taxonomy was developed with the help of three subject matter experts and is being refined continuously (Bosco et al, ). In addition, the taxonomy creation and refinement follows the standards of the National Information Standards Organization’s (2005) guidelines for the construction, format, and management of monolingual controlled vocabularies (Bosco et al, ).…”

“…metaBUS also allows for the researcher to exclude articles, reverse‐code articles if needed, or use the moderator option to sort by criteria such as funding source, country, or publication year. More detail on how to filter query results can be found in Bosco et al (). If additional information is needed by the researcher (e.g., reliability index), a more detailed output can be requested from the metaBUS founders (F. A. Bosco, personal communication, July 29, 2016).…”

“…The main purpose of metaBUS is a research synthesis platform that also allows scholars and practitioners to run meta‐analyses from a database with over a million research findings (Bosco et al, ). While metaBUS is a viable search engine for HRD related meta‐analyses (Bosco et al, ), the purpose of this article is to show that metaBUS can also be utilized for other research purposes such as (a) a starting point for identifying keywords when conducting literature reviews, (b) checking the reliability of published instruments, and (c) sourcing data for secondary data analyses.…”