Citizen Science: An Information Quality Research Frontier

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.

Citizen science and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals

“…Although we have demonstrated that citizen-science data clearly have value for the SDGs, there is at least one major barrier to its use: uncertainty regarding the quality of the data. This remains one of the most discussed and researched aspects in the field of citizen science 23 . Many papers have shown, however, that citizens are able to make valuable and scientifically valid contributions that are on par with professional scientists 24 .…”

“…Volunteer training and ongoing feedback are two of the most obvious ways to improve quality but numerous approaches have been developed, such as comparison with professionally collected data, validation by experts, peer review, filtering of outliers through automated processing, consensus-based methods including weighting by volunteer performance, and use of standardized and calibrated measurement tools 24 . Moreover, artificial intelligence and data mining are now increasingly being used to improve quality (for example, by providing hints to volunteers based on automatic recognition of species from photographs) 23 . Systematic bias can be handled using the same statistical methods that are applied to data collected by professionals while approaches are being developed for handling volunteer bias 24 , which is of particular relevance to citizen science.…”

Citizen Science in Information Systems Research

“…Lukyanenko et al (2019a, p. 7) state that despite the importance for the society and the relatedness to our discipline IS ''[…] continues to lag behind such disciplines as biology and education in working with citizen science as a context for research.'' Disciplines like biology, conservation, and physics are much more active here (demonstrated clearly by Lukyanenko et al 2019b). Although there are some academic articles in IS literature on citizen science there is still a lack of citizen science projects with clear IS research questions.…”

Digital Platforms of Work and the Crafting of Career Path: The Crowdworkers’ Perspective

“…Crowdsourcing has risen in popularity as it provides access to a large and diverse pool of workers and employers across geographical boundaries, anywhere in the world. Currently, the crowdsourcing model has been implemented for different purposes and forms including for open innovation and idea generation (Ayaburi et al 2019;Sun and Tan 2019;Meng et al 2019;Hellström 2016;Poetz and Schreier 2012;Muhdi et al 2011;Piller 2011), solving societal problems in what is called citizen science (Ogie et al 2019;Tung and Jordann 2017;Xu et al 2016;Lakhani et al 2012;Gao et al 2011), raising capital funds in what is named crowdfunding (Rashid et al 2019;Brown et al 2017;Paschen 2017), engagement and collaboration with government as part of citizens empowerment (Lukyanenko et al 2019;Aitamurto 2018;Certomà and Rizzi 2017;Hsu et al 2017;Rotich 2017) and recently for sourcing paid labour and employment in what is termed crowdwork (Durward et al 2016;Heeks 2017). Hence, crowdsourcing became a broad umbrella term that covers different ways of using digital platforms for involving crowds of individuals for different purposes and providing different types of remunerations and incentives.…”