Abstract
Citizen Science is research undertaken by professional scientists and members of the public collaboratively. Despite numerous benefits of citizen science for both the advancement of science and the community of the citizen scientists, there is still no comprehensive knowledge of patterns of contributions, and the demography of contributors to citizen science projects. In this paper we provide a first overview of spatiotemporal and gender distribution of citizen science workforce by analyzing 54 million classifications contributed by more than 340 thousand citizen science volunteers from 198 countries to one of the largest online citizen science platforms, Zooniverse. First we report on the uneven geographical distribution of the citizen scientist and model the variations among countries based on the socio-economic conditions as well as the level of research investment in each country. Analyzing the temporal features of contributions, we report on high “burstiness” of participation instances as well as the leisurely nature of participation suggested by the time of the day that the citizen scientists were the most active. Finally, we discuss the gender imbalance among online citizen scientists (about 30% female) and compare it with other collaborative projects as well as the gender distribution in more formal scientific activities. Online citizen science projects need further attention from outside of the academic community, and our findings can help attract the attention of public and private stakeholders, as well as to inform the design of the platforms and science policy making processes.
Highlights
The growth of online collaboration between scientists and the public on research projects in recent years have led to numerous discoveries at unprecedented rates in various fields of science
What are the reasons for the uneven geographies of engagement in citizen science? We considered various factors, which fall into two categories: socio-economic and scientific culture
— — — 0.012 0.000 0.000 when only Internet connectivity and school enrollment are considered (Model 3), the outcome is still considerable at 0.66. These results indicate that taken separately, each factor has varying rates of influence on citizen science, but in tandem they explain the major bulk of engagement in the Zooniverse
Summary
The growth of online collaboration between scientists and the public on research projects in recent years have led to numerous discoveries at unprecedented rates in various fields of science. Among these are projects called citizen science which involve non-scientists in research work. The collective efforts of citizen scientists, as these volunteers are known, to one of the online citizen science platforms called the Zooniverse, was estimated to be wort United States $1.5 million in 2015 by. In terms of research outputs, several Zooniverse projects have led several important discoveries, in the field of astronomy. Trouille, and Lintott identify two types of discovery: intended ones which are known targets of certain research projects, and serendipitous ones, which arise from “our innate human ability to notice things that are out of the ordinary” [5]
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