Empirical work on English historical corpus linguistics is plentiful but fragmented, and some of it is hard to come by. This paper proposes a solution for making it more accessible and reusable for meta-analysis. We present an online Language Change Database (LCD), which provides comparative, real-time baseline data from earlier corpus-based studies. LCD entries summarize the findings and include numerical data from the articles. We discuss the LCD from the perspective of database design and linked data management. Furthermore, we illustrate the reuse of LCD data through a meta-analysis of the history of English connectives. For this purpose, we have developed an application called the LCD Aggregated Data Analysis workbench (LADA). We show how researchers can use LADA to filter, refine and visualize LCD data. Thus we are paving the way for a future where both research results and research data are regularly available for verification, validation and re-use. hundreds of individual studies. For instance, Reynolds et al. (2003) studied the association between alcohol consumption and risk of stroke by examining 122 reports and 35 observational studies published in 1966-2002. Renehan et al. (2008, on the other hand, studied the association between body mass index and cancer risk based on 221 data sets from 141 research articles, and Wang et al. (2016) based their metaanalysis of coffee and cancer risk on 105 articles selected from a total of 69,495 potential articles. These kinds of large-scale analyses can be used to establish the current state-of-the-art in the field studied, and they also have the potential to result in new and significant findings: the results of meta-analyses are often more than just the sum of their parts. Importantly, it would have been impossible to carry out such analyses without access to the results gained in earlier research as well as to the actual research data.Similarly to medicine, meta-analyses in linguistics are based on a large body of quantitative results obtained in earlier research. However, not all fields of linguistics have traditionally made use of quantitative data, and even in some of the more quantitatively-oriented fields, such as historical corpus linguistics, the research results may be reported by way of illustrative examples instead of frequency tables. Consequently, meta-analyses in many fields of linguistics have been relatively uncommon. A notable exception is applied linguistics, which has a long tradition in quantitative methods. Here, the beginnings of research synthesis and meta-analysis extend back to the 1970s (Chaudron 2006). The articles in Norris and Ortega (2000) provide examples of meta-analyses on effective teaching practices, effectiveness of corrective feedback, and adult second-language learners' access to Universal Grammar. Durrant (2014), on the other hand, studied the use of corpora in test design by carrying out a meta-analysis based on 19 different tests with 1,568 individual test takers. His goal was to determine the correlation between second-l...
