At the Psychonomic Society Digital Event, Research in Time of Crisis, in May 2020, members contributed ideas on how to do “science without the drag.” That is, how do we produce, evaluate, and disseminate high-quality research to match the rapid pace of decision-making needed in the face of COVID-19?
Below are the links to the various topics covered during the Digital Event:
#researchINcrisis: Digital Event kick-off
Mobilizing behavioral scientists to respond to COVID-19
To create social good, psychology needs credible evidence
Bringing together behavioural scientists for crisis knowledge management
Boosting COVID-19 related behavioral science by feeding and consulting an eclectic knowledge base
From a tweet to Reddit and beyond: The road to a global behavioral science SWAT team
As new venues for peer review flower, will journals catch up?
From peer review to “science without the drag” via PsyArXiv
Enhancing Peer Review of Scientific Reports
A tale of two island nations: Lessons for crisis knowledge management
Six months on, as the global fight against the pandemic continues to require rapid responses from governments and world leaders, the role of behavioral scientists remains incredibly important. Our team at SciBeh has been following up on an issue from the Digital Event, which is how we manage our online information environment. We can learn from the experiences of many diverse teams who have enacted innovative solutions, for example, to accelerate reviews (e.g., Rapid Review Covid-19, ASAPbio) and consolidate knowledge (e.g., SciBeh, CovidScholar), or provide independent recommendations from evidence.
Many challenges still lie ahead for research in this crisis:
The scientific community has been highly active with COVID-related research, but what is the best way to aggregate it? What design features do we need to make this knowledge aggregation useful for policymakers and the public? What can Natural Language Processing and/or Machine Learning presently deliver in terms of knowledge retrieval, aggregation, and evaluation, that we aren’t exploiting yet?
How do we make sure findings from behavioral science research can be transformed into evidence-based policy? To drill down further,
- Are we communicating the right outputs, in the right format, and in time for rapid decision-making?
- In what ways could we crowdsource expertise to synthesize, critique, and distill existing and new knowledge?
Open science has leaped forward in enabling transparent, quick sharing of research and data, but other questions remain:
- How do we manage the accompanying challenges in quality control?
- What roles must researchers play to manage open science so that it is useful for policy response?
Twitter and other online spaces help accelerate research discussions and increase transparency to the public, but that brings us to another set of questions:
- How do we manage discourse in a constructive way?
- How should researchers engage in online research discourse to combat misinformation?
Stemming the spread of misinformation is especially critical, as the promulgation of “scientific” opinions contrary to established science can damage the public health response.
Since the Psychonomic Society the 10-day Digital Event #researchINcrisis, in which many novel and creative ideas were proposed, the discussions and implementations of various ideas have followed. As the crisis continues, we need to keep reviewing and improving the way we do science. It is time to examine what we’ve done about these issues in the past six months, and more crucially, how do we move forward and do better?
We will address this important question in a workshop early next week from 9-10 November. It’s free, and still open for registration, so if you are also still grappling with these questions, and want to contribute to advancements, come join us!
As scientists, we all need to have a voice in how our field responds to the crisis. Let’s keep these discussions happening.
