StudySwap is Celebrating Its First Birthday!

It is amazing to think that we launched just over one year ago (March 2nd, 2017) with just a couple of example posts, a twitter account, and some bare bones information on our OSF page. It has been a fun and rewarding year for us. Here, we list some of our personal highlights.

Successful collaborations completed or in progress:

Year 1 saw a nice initial set of collaborations facilitated via StudySwap, demonstrating the efficacy of the site for finding like-minded researchers with complimentary resources and data collection capacity. A few examples:

• Martin Schweinsberg recruited labs for Pipeline Project #2
• Katie Corker recruited labs for Many Labs 5
• Jaya Karunagharan found a collaborator in the Netherlands to extend findings from a study conducted in Malaysia
• Savannah Lewis (an undergrad in my lab) collected data for Liam Satchell, while he switched institutions and got his lab up and running. She had this to say about the experience: “Through StudySwap I had the opportunity to work with Liam Satchell on a different type of research than I would normally be able to with my current research mentors. This collaboration has helped me become a more well-rounded researcher and allowed me to have a wider range of experiences on my CV for my graduate school applications.”

More posts awaiting collaborators:

There are also several quite interesting posts that still await collaborators:

• Harry Manley posted a standing offer to collaborate with anyone who would like to attempt a replication of their study outside of a WEIRD sample (he can collect data in Thailand).
• Dan Simons is willing to collect data in his lab in Illinois.
• Xenia Schmalz is seeking a collaborator with expertise in computational modeling.

Getting the word out:

This first year has also been chock full of great opportunities to share information about StudySwap with a wide audience:

• Covered in The Scientist and Retraction Watch
• Wrote a step-by-step Tutorial (to be submitted soon) for using StudySwap
• Presented to our peers at SIPS and SPSP
• Attended and supported the first ever “StudySwap Live” meetup to foster collaborations on hard-to-reach populations

Eyeballs on StudySwap:

Posts on StudySwap are now being seen by a large number of researchers, increasing the likelihood that suitable collaborators are are found:

• We have over 1,000 followers on twitter and we share every post on our feed.
• StudySwap was visited 6,837 times this year!
• Our OSF page with supplementary documents has been visited over 2,500 times.
• Posts  were downloaded over 500 times

New, welcoming publication outlet:

Collabra: Psychology–the official journal of SIPS–is supporting a Nexus that will be an outlet for multi-site collaborative research projects. This is exciting for a few reasons. First, because there is an outlet specifically for the publication of these projects, we are hoping that this Nexus encourages some researchers to coordinate or contribute to one of these projects. Second, this Nexus is offering a Registered Reports submission format where a proposing researcher can get an in-principle acceptance of their multi-site study before data collection. In addition to vetting the data collection protocol via the Registered Reports process, an in-principle acceptance is believed to make it easier to recruit other researchers to join a multi-site collaborative project.

If you are interested in proposing a multi-site collaborative research project, you can submit a Stage 1 Registered Report proposal to Collabra: Psychology. Be sure to indicate you are submitting to the special Nexus on crowdsourced research. If you are interested in contributing to one of these projects, you can follow StudySwap on twitter and facebook. We will be using social media to recruit labs to contribute to those projects.

New team member:

Finally, we closed out year 1 by expanding out team. We are thrilled to welcome Amy Riegelman, a Social Sciences Librarian at the University of Minnesota, as the third official member of the StudySwap crew.

Here’s hoping our second year is even better than our first!