Trying to understand the vast proliferation of ‘citizen science’ projects is a Herculean task right now, with projects cropping up all over the place dealing with both online data analysis like that which concerns us here at the Zooniverse and with data collection and observation of the natural world via projects like iNaturalist. As the number of projects increases, so do questions about the effectiveness of these projects, and so does our desire to keep track of the impact all of the effort put into them is having.

These aren’t easy questions to answer, and an attempt to track the use of citizen science in the literature is made by Ria Follett and Vladimir Strezov, two researchers in the Department of Environmental Sciences at Macquarie University, in a recent paper published in the journal PLOS One. They look at papers including the words ‘citizen science’, and includes the surprising result that ‘online’ projects accounted for only 12% of their sample. They explain :

The missing articles dis- cussed discoveries generated using “galaxy zoo” data, rather than acknowledging the contribtions of the citizens who created this data.

This, to me, is pushing a definition to extremes. Every one of the ‘missing’ papers cited has a link to a list of volunteers who contributed; several have volunteers listed on the author list! To claim that we’re not ‘acknowledging the contribtions’ of volunteers because we don’t use the shibboleth ‘citizen science’ is ridiculous. Other Zooniverse projects, such as Planet Hunters, don’t even appear in the study for much the same reason, and it’s sad that a referee didn’t dig deeper into the limited methodology used in the article.

Part of the problem here is the age-old argument about the term ‘citizen science’. It’s not a description most of our volunteers would use of themselves, but rather a term imposed from the academy to describe (loosely!) the growing phenomenon of public participation in public research. In most of our Galaxy Zoo papers, we refer to ‘volunteers’ rather than ‘citizen scientists’ – and we believe strongly in acknowledging the contributions of everyone to a project, whatever term they choose to label themselves with.

Chris