World Database of Happiness

Abstract

Social scientists are producing an ever-growing stream of research findings, which is becoming ever more difficult to oversee. As a result, capitalization on earlier research investment is declining, and the accumulation of knowledge is stagnating. This situation calls for more research synthesis, and today, interest in synthetic techniques is on the rise. To date, attention has been focused on techniques for meta-analysis, with little attention paid to the preliminary step of bringing the available research findings together. What we need is (1) techniques that can be used to describe research findings in a comparable way, (2) a system for storing such descriptions in an easily accessible archive, and (3) a system to which research findings can be added on a continuous basis.