Early in the morning, on February 2, 2023, the 25th Etmaal conference at the University of Twente hosted the Media Psychology pre-conference focused on Systematic Review and Bibliographical Analyses. During this session, Joël Hendrix and Adriaan Denkers discussed their ways of dealing with the explosion of available literature. Joël is a PhD Candidate at Radboud University (Behavioural Science Institute) and her research focuses on how entertainment media can influence people’s openness towards underrepresented groups and the cognitive and affective processes that play a part in this. Adriaan Denkers has worked as a senior scientist for the Dutch Government, as an associate professor in psychology and criminology, and (currently) as an independent social scientist.
Firstly, Joël introduced us to a novel tool: ASReview LAB. This is a free and open-source artificial intelligence tool developed by a team of researchers at Utrecht University. It helps to screen large amounts of text using state-of-the-art active learning techniques. Every day, many articles are published in many journals. The steady increase in publications makes it impossible for us to stay up to date on every development and knowledge gap within our field and adjacent fields. Systematic literature reviews and meta-analyses can help us summarize the current research on relevant topics. However, such reviews and analyses are often not conducted because of their time-consuming procedure. By using the tool’s innovative algorithm, we can save much valuable time. Joël indicated that she and her colleagues had positive experiences using the AI tool.
Another novel approach to help researchers cope with the constantly growing influx of new scientific articles within their area of interest is bibliographical analyses. Unlike the traditional literature review, tooling helps researchers analyze and plot four different level metrics: sources, authors, documents, and clustering by coupling. This approach also analyzes three knowledge structures: conceptual structure, intellectual structure, and social structure. In the second presentation, Adriaan Denkers introduced us to this approach by showing the results of recent bibliographical analyzes of the Value of Sustainability; a study of the scientific literature.
