One of a kind: The tail of citizen science volunteers

Abstract

Online citizen science projects recruit members of the public (volunteers) to contribute to scientific research. Many projects involve volunteers donating processing capacity on their computers to process datasets. Retaining and motivating volunteers is a critical challenge. Existing studies of volunteers identify categories of volunteers, describing the main motivations and contributions of these categories. Based on case studies comprising surveys (n = 2031) and interviews (n = 39) with volunteers in two projects, Einstein@Home and Cosmology@Home, we identify volunteers who do not fit easily into these categories. These volunteers exhibit non‐typical motivations (e.g., getting acknowledgements in scientific publications, and accumulating Gridcoin) or non‐typical contributions (e.g., successfully proposing new lines of work or projects, and conducting and presenting studies of subgroups of volunteers to teams running projects). These volunteers make vital contributions to projects. However, measures taken by project teams based on prior studies of volunteers may be ineffective in retaining and motivating these non‐typical volunteers.

The Library's Changing Role in Supporting Music Research: Part of the special collection on MusicLab Copenhagen.

“…However, there is a great potential in involving both audience and musicians in defining the research question and method design, and enabling them to participate in the analysis part by arranging more hack labs. MusicLab is not a typical citizen science project where volunteers are encouraged to collect or describe data, often in online environments (Lee & Darch, 2019); it does, however, share many of the qualities and goals of citizen science, including the creation of engagement and dialogue with the research participants while gaining new knowledge. When professional musicians and audiences are engaging in research during the MusicLab events, civic engagement in science is promoted and the public is both creating and gaining new knowledge.…”