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Metascience – The Science of Doing Science

Association for Psychological Science
Jonathan Schooler University of California,
Santa Barbara, CA, USA
2019 Foundations

The field of metascience has gained increasing momentum in recent years as concerns about research reproducibility have fueled a larger vision of how the lens of science can be directed toward the scientific process itself. Metascience, also known as metaresearch or the science of science, attempts to use quantifiable scientific methods to elucidate how science works and why it sometimes fails.

Metascience has its roots in the philosophy of science and the study of scientific methods. However, it is distinguished from the former by its reliance on quantitative analysis and from the latter by its broad focus on the general factors that contribute to all aspects of the scientific process. Metascience also draws on the more narrowly defined fields of journalology, which studies the academic publishing process, and scientometrics, which uses bibliographic data in scientific publications to understand the impact of research articles.

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This work was supported (in part) by the Fetzer Franklin Fund.