Re-SearchTerms is an interactive R Shiny application designed for exploring how research terms in open scholarship, metascience, and research practice are defined across different sources.
The platform enables users to:
- compare definitions across sources
- examine relationships between terms and definitions
- analyse linguistic and semantic patterns in how core research concepts are described
Re-SearchTerms was originally developed as part of the doctoral dissertation of Anna Yi Leung, which examined conceptual variability and terminological ambiguity in open scholarship and psychological science.
In collaboration with FORRT, the current version represents an expanded and evolving platform that aims to:
- expand the dataset in alignment with the development of the FORRT Glossary
- introduce new analytical features
- support community contributions
- Definition-level comparison across sources
- Word co-occurrence network visualisation across definitions of terms
- Concept-level network analysis (e.g., cluster graphs, linguistic feature comparisons)
re-searchterms/
│
├── app.R # Main Shiny application
│
├── data/ # Processed datasets used by the app
│ ├── df_bydefinition.csv
│ ├── df_byterm.csv
│ ├── pairwise_cosine_similarity.csv
│ └── umap_df.csv
│
├── data-raw/ # Data pre-processing pipeline scripts
│ ├── 01_ingest_forrt.R
│ ├── 01b_ingest_wiktionary.R
│ ├── 01c_ingest_igi.R
│ ├── 02_standardise_schema.R
│ ├── 03_merge_sources.R
│ ├── 04_clean_text.R
│ └── 10_build_app_data.R
│
├── www/ # Static assets
│ └── forrt_logo.jpg
│
├── README.md
└── .gitignore
The full data pipeline is documented in data-raw/.
Pipeline steps include:
- Data ingestion (FORRT, Wiktionary, IGI)
- Schema standardisation
- Merging across sources
- Text cleaning and preprocessing
- Embedding and similarity computation
- Construction of app-ready datasets
To rebuild the datasets:
source("data-raw/10_build_app_data.R")Raw datasets are not included due to size and/or source restrictions.
To reproduce the dataset:
-
Access original sources:
- FORRT glossary
- Wiktionary
- IGI Global: InfoScipedia
-
Run scripts in
data-raw/
Processed datasets used by the app are included in:
data
Project Lead Anna Yi Leung (Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich, Germany)
Co-Project Lead Dr. Daniel Kristanto (Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg, Germany)
The project is open to collaboration, and additional contributors will be acknowledged as the platform evolves.
The development and evaluation of Re-SearchTerms has been accepted for publication:
Leung, A. Y., Kristanto, D., & Schmalz, X. (2026, accepted). Re-SearchTerms: A Shiny app for exploring terminology variations in psychology and metascience. Meta-Psychology.
Citation details will be updated upon publication.
For a detailed description of the conceptual framework, methods, and development of the app, please refer to our preprint:
https://osf.io/preprints/osf/qsp7x_v2
The initial development of Re-SearchTerms was supported by the META-REP Priority Programme and the German Research Foundation (DFG).
We thank Dr. Xenia Schmalz for her contributions to the first edition of the app.
The current version represents an independent and expanded development. We thank Dr. Flavio Azevedo (Director of FORRT) and Dr. Lukas Wallrich (Co-Chair of FORRT) for their technical feedback and for supporting the integration of the project within FORRT.
This project is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license unless stated otherwise.