Improving usability of social and behavioral sciences’ evidence: A call to action for a national infrastructure project for mining our knowledge

Abstract

Over the last century, the social and behavioral sciences have accumulated a vast storehouse of knowledge with the potential to transform society and all its constituents. Unfortunately, this knowledge has accumulated in a form (e.g., journal papers) and scale that makes it extremely difficult to search, categorize, analyze, and integrate across studies. In this commentary based on a National Science Foundation-funded workshop, we describe the social and behavioral sciences’ knowledge-management problem. We discuss the knowledge-scale problem and how we lack a common language, a common format to represent knowledge, a means to analyze and summarize in an automated way, and approaches to visualize knowledge at a large scale. We then describe that we need a collaborative research program between information systems, information science, and computer science (IICS) researchers and social and behavioral science (SBS) researchers to develop information system artifacts to address the problem that many scientific disciplines share but that the social and behavioral sciences have uniquely not addressed.