There is now a new website for researchers to ask and answerquestions on topics related to psychology and cognitive science.The site is cogsci.stackexchange.com.From the success of earlier released sites in the Stack Exchangenetwork such as those on programming, statistics, and latex,the site for psychology and cognitive science has the potential be a greatresource for researchers.I'm activelycontributing on the site.So, if you are a researcher in psychology, I hope you'll check itout.The rest of this post sets out (a) a little history of Stack Exchange question and answer sites as they relate to psychology and statistics; (b) why I think this new site for psychology and cognitive sciencehas so much potential; and(c) why, if you are a professional or student researcher in psychology, youmight want to get involved.
A little history
I first learnt about the Stack Exchange network back in 2009. While I was busy learning R, a number of people in the online data science world such as JD Long, Michael Driscoll,Drew Conway, and manymore were promoting a programmer'squestion and answer site called Stack Overflow as a place to ask and answer Rrelated questions.It was a site pitched at overcoming the many problems of discussion boards,mailing lists, and the like: e.g., off topic threads, spam, extended discussiondifficulty finding the correct answers, poor indexing by Google, etc.As of Feb 2011, it now has over 10,000 questions with the Rtag.
Shortly afterwards, the Stack Exchange Network developed Area51.The idea was to take the question and answer infrastructure that made StackOverflow a success in the programming world, and extend it to all sorts of otherdomains.Instead of going down the model of Quora or, shudder to think, Yahoo Answers,Stack Exchange did not permit the creation of a site until a sufficientcommunity of active users existed to maintain the site at a high standard.Thus, my main interests, statistics and psychology were going to have to wait.
A site for statistics questions was the first to join the network(stats.stackexchange.com).Professor Rob Hyndman proposed thesite, and perhaps given theoverlapping worlds of programmers and data analysts, thesite launched a few months later in July 2010.At the time of posting it has over 7,000questions.I've been actively involved in the site.I've used it to get advice on my own research.I've also used it extensively in various statistical consulting roles.In particular, I've encouraged others who would otherwise send me an email aboutstatistics, to post the question onstats.seso that any answer can be an ongoing resource for others.
In the case of psychology and cognitive science, I've had to wait a lot longer.The overlap between programming and psychology communities is much smaller,and site proposals were split over separate cognitive science, psychology, andpsychiatry proposals.Finally, in December 2011 these three proposals were merged and on January 19th 2012 thesite was launched in Beta under the title Cognitive Sciences at the urlcogsci.stackexchange.com.Although the initial name is suggestive of a focus on "cognitive" science. The history of the merging of site proposals, the inclusion of the "s", plural"sciences", and the attitude of current participants admits the full range ofquestions in cognitive science, psychology, and psychiatry.
At the time of posting the site is growing at a healthy rate. Most questions are getting good answers, and the community norms around questionquality, references, scope and so on are being clarified on the metasite.However, there is also the challenge of getting the word out about the site toacademics, researchers, and graduate students who are not otherwise familiarwith the Stack Exchange network of sites.In my opinion, Stack Exchange provides the best currently availableinfrastructure for building a high quality question and answer site. However, it still relies on a community of expert contributors.
So, if you're a researcher in psychology or cognitive science, why might youwant to get involved? And why might you want to talk to fellow researchers aboutthe?
Reasons to participate as an academic
If you are an academic, Lecturer, or Post Doc, there are many reasons why youmight want to participate:
- Answering questions is a way of facilitating knowledge transfer to thebroader community; this can be intrinsically enjoyable especially when you get directfeedback on the number of people who read your answers.
- If you use your own name, as many people do, the voting and reputation system,and various other mechanisms provide a means for your contribution to berecognised.
- You get immediate feedback on what others think of your answers; Thus, itcreates an environment of feedback conducive to learning.
- I see sites like Stack Exchange as part of a broader model of open science.As you create and develop knowledge, you encounter challenges. The idea is torecord these challenges as questions and then add the resolutions as answers.Thus, when others encounter the same problems, good answers are only a Googlesearch away.I'm not saying that question and answer sites replace journal articles, butthey can fill a bridging role linking the language of questions to the answersprovided in journal articles.
- Furthermore, the content on Stack Exchange is licenced under creative commons,so even if the site disappeared the content would still be available on othersites that reproduce the material. This is much betterthan the policy of almost all journals which copyright your, typically, state-sponsoredresearch and lock it up behind a pay wall, thereby frustrating theprocess of knowledge dissemination.
- While contributing to Wikipedia is another great way to improve the sum of allknowledge, unlike Wikipedia, your answers generally stay there; in contrast toWikipedia, where your contributions can and are often completely removed byother editors.
Reasons to participate as a student researcher
If you are doing a thesis in psychology or cognitive science, or possibly even ifyou are just studying a few subjects, many of the above reasons forparticipating will also apply.
However, you may also find that the capacity to ask questions will beparticularly useful. As a side point, if it is early days in your career, youmay or may not want to use your real name.
In particular, I'd encourage students completing a thesis to incorporate askingand answering questions into their scholarly process.You might encounter questions like:
- Is there a meta analysis on X?
- What are the main theory about Y?
- What is the best measure of Z?
- What is the empirical support for theory W?
These kinds of questions come up all the time when doing research.Of course, as researchers we have strategies for finding answers ourselves.However, the stack exchange model encourages you to learn from the answers ofothers and also to "leave crumbs" so that others can follow in your footstepsmore easily. The idea is not be shy. Post questions frequently. If you're ableto answer your question, contribute a self-answer.
Thus, even if only a handful of people ever read a thesis, by asking andanswering many questions along the way, resources will be left that thousands ofpeople will learn from and discover through Google searches in the years tocome. Even if you don't have answers, your question can be the trigger for anexpert to share knowledge to create a valuable Internet artefact.
Getting Started
If you want to learn more or give the site a go:
- Have a read through the FAQ on cogsci.se
- Ask a question
- See if you can answer one of the currently unansweredquestions
I'm floating around on thesite, so if you're aresearcher in psychology, I hope to see youthere.
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