MetaBUS

Too much of a good thing…  Over recent decades, academics have made great strides all over the globe; enabled by technology, the amount of accessible research and data has skyrocketed. Paradoxically, all that wealth of information was threatening to slow research down.   

Before a researcher sets out to make a valuable contribution to the existing body of knowledge, he or she wades through rivers of journal findings and determines their relevance. It can take months and even years before the researcher understands what questions research already answered, where knowledge gaps exist and what the existing research results show. Designed as a scientific finding search engine, metaBUS makes it possible for researchers to get a handle on vast amounts of research in seconds or minutes.

MetaBUS was created by Dr. Piers Steel, the Canadian Centre for Advanced Leadership’s Research Chair, together with Dr. Frank Bosco from Virginia Commonwealth University and Dr. Krista Uggerslev from NAIT.

Taking a step beyond other academic search engines such as Google Scholar, metaBUS maps scientific findings from every journal article over the last 25 years for identified journals from a range of HR-related fields. When searching for any mapped topic, researchers gain access to every article with data on that topic and, in a matter of seconds, can have distilled the body of knowledge related to their topic of interest. metaBUS makes it possible for researchers to readily integrate scientifically examined data and better define research questions.

What does metaBUS mean for industry? Steel, Bosco, Uggerslev and their team envision metaBUS changing the way we do Human Resource Management (HR). metaBUS maps the HR field with links to more than one million research findings. The data allows users to compile instant analyses with analytics.

One example of the contribution of metaBUS to HR practice is a cross-cultural management article published in the Harvard Business Review titled “Research: The Biggest Culture Gaps are within Countries, not between them” (May, 2016). Thanks to metaBUS, Piers Steel, Bradley Kirkman and Vas Taras were able to quickly compile and analyse 558 existing studies conducted over the last 35 years on work-related values covering 32 countries. Their study shows that country is no longer a sufficient cultural category for work-related values such as individual vs. groups, hierarch, certainty, and material wealth vs societal welfare and harmony.

While metaBUS still requires more investment before it fully reaches its goal of changing the speed and collaboration of science in Human Resource Management, the project has already changed academic research. metaBUS allows researchers to stand on the shoulders of all previous scholarship while making knowledge accessible to all – including beyond academia.

To learn more about metaBUS, click here.