Abstract
The rapid proliferation of online content producing and sharing technologies resulted in an explosion of user-generated content (UGC), which now extends to scientific data. Citizen science, in which ordinary people contribute information for scientific research, epitomizes UGC. Citizen science projects are typically open to everyone, engage diverse audiences, and challenge ordinary people to produce data of highest quality to be usable in science. This also makes citizen science a very exciting area to study both traditional and innovative approaches to information quality management. With this paper we position citizen science as a leading information quality research frontier. We also show how citizen science opens a unique opportunity for the information systems community to contribute to a broad range of disciplines in natural and social sciences and humanities.
Highlights
Increased availability of digital resources to support critical decisions makes information quality (IQ) a paramount concern for organizations and society
Citizen science is an established topic in natural sciences, it is a relatively recent area of research in the information systems discipline, including a stream focused on information quality, and in related fields such as computing
A general lesson emerging from this research is that the physical environment and hardware characteristics have a measurable impact on information quality – a novel consideration for traditional information systems research, which routinely abstracts away implementation details when dealing with representational issues (Jabbari et al 2018; Jabbari Sabegh et al 2017; Wand and Weber 1995)
Summary
Increased availability of digital resources to support critical decisions makes information quality (IQ) a paramount concern for organizations and society. Unlike information produced by organizational employees, suppliers, and contractors with close ties to the organization, UGC is created by Bcasual^ content contributors with varying levels of subject matter expertise, reasons for producing content, backgrounds, and worldviews (Daugherty et al 2008; Levina and Arriaga 2014; Lukyanenko et al 2014b; Susarla et al 2012) In some such projects, content producers remain largely anonymous, making it challenging to determine contribution quality based on traditional indicators like known credentials. We offer directions for future research in citizen science and IS focusing on IQ and conclude by identifying the value that citizen science research can bring to strengthening connections between the information systems discipline and other fields in sciences and humanities
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