Analysis of the evolution and collaboration networks of citizen science scientific publications

Abstract

The term citizen science refers to a broad set of practices developed in a growing number of areas of knowledge and characterized by the active citizen participation in some or several stages of the research process. Definitions, classifications and terminology remain open, reflecting that citizen science is an evolving phenomenon, a spectrum of practices whose classification may be useful but never unique or definitive. The aim of this article is to study citizen science publications in journals indexed by WoS, in particular how they have evolved in the last 20 years and the collaboration networks which have been created among the researchers in that time. In principle, the evolution can be analyzed, in a quantitative way, by the usual tools, such as the number of publications, authors, and impact factor of the papers, as well as the set of different research areas including citizen science as an object of study. But as citizen science is a transversal concept which appears in almost all scientific disciplines, this study becomes a multifaceted problem which is only partially modelled with the usual bibliometric magnitudes. It is necessary to consider new tools to parametrize a set of complementary properties. Thus, we address the study of the citizen science expansion and evolution in terms of the properties of the graphs which encode relations between scientists by studying co-authorship and the consequent networks of collaboration. This approach - not used until now in research on citizen science, as far as we know- allows us to analyze the properties of these networks through graph theory, and complement the existing quantitative research. The results obtained lead mainly to: (a) a better understanding of the current state of citizen science in the international academic system-by countries, by areas of knowledge, by interdisciplinary communities-as an increasingly legitimate expanding methodology, and (b) a greater knowledge of collaborative networks and their evolution, within and between research communities, which allows a certain margin of predictability as well as the definition of better cooperation strategies.

A Citizen Science Community of Practice: Relational Patterns Contributing to Shared Practice

“…Lessons from the Australian experience are likely to be broadly relevant areas of consideration for other citizen science practitioner networks, given the similar history and goals of many of the emergent communities (Gobel et al 2016;Storksdieck et al 2016). Since citizen science programs and goals typically extend beyond national borders, an important area of study is how interactions are initiated, maintained, and strengthened across these individual practitioner networks (McPherson, Smith-Lovin and Cook 2001;Pelacho et al 2020). Facilitating collaboration across global practitioner networks requires boundary crossing (Huang 2017), that is, people crossing over from one community to another.…”

Design Thinking as a Means of Citizen Science for Social Innovation

“…The involvement of scientist-supervised citizens (laypeople or volunteers) in research with the use of the citizen science tools have been a boom for scientific publications with exponential growth of citizen science publications in indexed journals for the last two decades (Sanz et al, 2021). Citizen science has benefited science and mankind through the projects that have proliferated despite the lack of an agreed definition of citizen science.…”

Analyzing the influence of prolific collaborations on authors productivity and visibility

“…We propose a directed and weighted network to quantify collaborations importance. All nodes and edges are established as in a traditional collaboration network (Amancio et al 2012, Pelacho et al 2021, Viana et al 2013. Two authors are linked if they coauthored at least one paper.…”