Fostering Scientific Meta-analyses with Knowledge Graphs: A Case-Study

A meta-analysis is a Science of Science method widely used in the medical and social sciences to review, aggregate and quantitatively synthesise a body of studies that address the same research question. With the volume of research growing exponentially every year, conducting meta-analyses can be costly and inefficient, as a significant amount of time and human efforts needs to be spent in finding studies meeting research criteria, annotating them, and properly performing the statistical analyses to summarise the findings. In this work, we show these issues can be tackled with semantic representations and technologies, using a social science scenario as case-study. We show how the domain-specific content of research outputs can be represented and used to facilitate their search, analysis and synthesis. We present the very first representation of the domain of human cooperation, and the application we built on top of this to help experts in performing meta-analyses semi-automatically. Using few application scenarios, we show how our approach supports the various phases meta-analyses, and more in general contributes towards research replication and automated hypotheses generation.