Abstract
Public involvement in science has allowed researchers to collect large-scale and real-time data and also engage citizens, so researchers are adopting citizen science (CS) in many areas. One promising appeal is student participation in CS school programs. In this literature review, we aimed to investigate which school CS programs exist in the areas of (applied) life sciences and if any projects target infectious disease surveillance. This review’s objectives are to determine success factors in terms of data quality and student engagement. After a comprehensive search in biomedical and social databases, we found 23 projects. None of the projects found focused on infectious disease surveillance, and the majority centered around species biodiversity. While a few projects had issues with data quality, simplifying the protocol or allowing students to resubmit data made the data collected more usable. Overall, students at different educational levels and disciplines were able to collect usable data that was comparable to expert data and had positive learning experiences. In this review, we have identified limitations and gaps in reported CS school projects and provided recommendations for establishing future programs. This review shows the value of using CS in collaboration with traditional research techniques to advance future science and increasingly engage communities.
Highlights
IntroductionThe Current Dilemma of Infectious Diseases and the Need for Early Detection Strategies
We investigate what programs in life sciences and applied life sciences have incorporated citizen science (CS) into various classroom settings, and the impact CS has on two outcome measures: data quality and student engagement
We described students’ participation in CS projects in recent years in several fields with a high proportion in ecology, microbiology and genetics and genomics
Summary
The Current Dilemma of Infectious Diseases and the Need for Early Detection Strategies. Emerging infectious diseases pose a clear burden for public health security and progression [1,2]. Recent epidemics such as Ebola, Zika, H1N1 and SARS-CoV-1 viruses have emerged and re-emerged in all parts of the world [3,4]. It is widely agreed that environmental changes, globalization, social-economic conflicts are important underlying factors for infectious disease emergence and transmission [5]. The COVID-19 pandemic underscored the weaknesses of current surveillance systems and the demand for better early detection strategies worldwide [6].
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