Synthometricon: A Search Engine for Navigating Assessment Space

Hommel, Björn E.

With the release of Synthometricon, researchers and practitioners get a single web app to search tens of thousands of questionnaires, surveys and tests, whether the goal is to find an established scale or to see where a new item pool repeats existing work.

BEH

Dr. Björn E. Hommel Senior Scientist

Together with the SYNTH research team, magnolia psychometrics announces the release of Synthometricon (from Ancient Greek, “dictionary of measured synthetics”), a search engine for measures in the behavioral sciences.

Synthometricon currently indexes more than 71,000 scales and subscales from over 28,000 published questionnaires, surveys and tests (and growing!). You enter a few items, and a fine-tuned language model^[1] estimates how strongly they would correlate with every scale in the database. Results therefore show what an instrument is estimated to actually measure, not what its name promises.^[2] Before developing an instrument of your own, you can check whether an established one already exists, or whether a supposedly new construct overlaps with existing instruments.

Try Synthometricon here: search.synth-science.org.

info Synthometricon runs as a free research preview on Hugging Face. If the app has gone idle, click "Restart Space" and give it a minute to start.

SYNTH is part of the DFG Priority Program META-REP (grant no. 546323839). magnolia psychometrics maintains Synthometricon on a voluntary basis.

References

Hommel, B. E., & Arslan, R. C. (2025). Language models accurately infer correlations between psychological items and scales from text alone. Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science, 8(4), 25152459251377093. https://doi.org/10.1177/25152459251377093
Hommel, B. E., Külpmann, A. I., & Arslan, R. C. (2026). Synthometricon: A search engine to identify conceptual overlap in measures in the behavioral sciences (Nfgmv_v3). PsyArXiv. https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/nfgmv_v3/

@misc{Hommel2026Synthometricon, author = {Hommel, Bj{\"o}rn E.}, title = {{Synthometricon: A Search Engine for Navigating Assessment Space}}, howpublished = {magnolia psychometrics}, year = 2026, month = oct, url = {https://magnolia-psychometrics.com/blog/synthometricon-release}, note = {Blog post} }

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