psymetadata and Nuijten et al (psychology datasets)
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psymetadata and Nuijten et al (psychology datasets)
Reference: Set of psychology datasets compiled by Rodriguez and Williams (2022). We also disaggregate a large meta-meta-analysis of intelligence research (Nuijten et al. 2020).
Snapshot date: Jan 2026
Research question: psymetadata is an R package that curates multiple open datasets from published meta-analyses in psychology for teaching and demonstrations. Nuijten et al. (2020) is a large meta-meta-analysis of intelligence research, which focused on power and small study effects.
Data availability: 22 datasets are distributed with the psymetadata R package (CRAN). We do not use its Many Labs 2 dataset, which we obtain from the original source and include separately. After excluding Many Labs 2 and separately representing the intelligence meta-meta-analysis, the remaining psychology datasets vary from 65 rows of data to over 1,000. The package is GPL-3; individual datasets originate from the cited source papers.
Data processing: minimal. We used regular expressions to extract year labels from titles. We dropped some invalid rows (missing, non-finite, or non-positive standard errors). Signed z-values were computed as effect sizes divided by their standard errors.
Additional grouping variable: name of the original psymetadata dataset.
Model of z-values
This documentation page covers more than one fitted dataset, so the fitted models are shown separately. The fitted mixture model is shown over the empirical distribution of absolute z-values. The solid line is a mixture of half-normals, with selection. The dashed line shows the distribution without selection. If there are inequalities (e.g. studies reporting p < 0.05) the histogram resamples values from the appropriate set.
psymetadata: psychology
Nuijten et al: intelligence
