PsychOpen CAMA: Publication of community‐augmented meta‐analyses in psychology

Abstract

To enable optimal decision‐making based on the best evidence available, open syntheses are called for. To make data accessible and comprehensible even for decision‐makers without proficient knowledge in meta‐analysis, a graphical user interface (GUI) provides flexible data visualizations including interpretation aids. Moreover, due to a growing number of research findings, efficient and easy updating of meta‐analyses is crucial to prevent waste in research. One label for a concept to meet these needs is community‐augmented meta‐analysis (CAMA). The research community at the one hand feeds the data repository of a CAMA with new data and on the other hand benefits from easy access to data and meta‐analyses on a GUI. PsychOpen CAMA has been released recently to serve the psychological research community as a whole by covering a broad scope of potential research domains. PsychOpen CAMA relies on a web application with an OpenCPU server for the R calculations. To achieve interoperability of different datasets with the analysis functions used in PsychOpen CAMA, a template for meta‐analytic data and machine‐readable metadata are used. In the future, the automation of workflows, flexibility of analysis options, and the scope of the platform will be further developed by making use of synergies with other resources and tools at ZPID. The article provides an overview on the rationale for the necessity of open syntheses and the CAMA approach, as well as a presentation of the architecture, user interface, functionalities and future challenges of PsychOpen CAMA.

Stress regulation via self-administered mindfulness and biofeedback interventions in adults: A pre-registered meta-analysis

“…All appendices can be found in the material section on the OSF page http://bit.ly/39MifmH.). We intend to build a cumulative scientific knowledge base by depositing the data of our meta-analysis to PsychOpen CAMA, a platform whose aim is to construct a community-augmented meta-analysis (Burgard et al, 2021;Tsuji et al, 2014).…”

Stress Regulation via Being in Nature and Social Support in Adults, a Meta-analysis

“…To ensure methodological rigor and transparency, our materials and analysis code are available on the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/6wpav/). As our goal is to build a database of data on different stress regulation strategies, we also added the data to PsychOpenCAMA, an existing public repository in which data from other meta-analyses are stored (Burgard, 2021). We already submitted data of our first pre-registered meta-analysis (Sparacio et al, 2022) to this platform on 24/09/2021.…”

“…It will therefore allow for a much better comparison to other interventions (such as biofeedback or self-administered mindfulness; Sparacio et al, 2022a, b). Finally, posting results of stress management techniques in an open repository (e.g., PsychOpen CAMA; Burgard et al, 2021) would allow other researchers to re-analyze the data and verify the validity of the results.…”

Data sharing in experimental fear and anxiety research: From challenges to a dynamically growing database in 10 simple steps

“…We aim to transfer the curated data collection to an aggregated, homogenized and dynamically growing FEAR BASE with the support of an infrastructure partner. The FEAR BASE including an automated submission portal and living meta-analysis (Burgard et al, 2022) would constitute a critical stepping stone in utilizing the wealth of the public data treasure to its full potential.…”

“…This will greatly facilitate the individual's contribution without requiring substantial time investment. It is our longterm goal to establish a dynamically growing resource with living content summaries and analytical tools (such as living meta-analyses for specific subsets (Burgard et al, 2022)). Currently, the datasets have not yet been merged into such a homogenized database and are only available as individual datasets via our curated collection including key meta-data features (https://osf.io/4kueh/).…”