Farmers as volunteers in research could potentially provide a rich resource for exploring sustainable agricultural research questions. To discern emerging patterns in citizen science-based studies on topics with relevance for sustainable agriculture and reveal salient challenges and opportunities for conducting such studies, we conducted a literature review of 27 articles from the period 2004–2019 of 250 publications screened from Google Scholar. These articles were thematically grouped under the topics: Soil health, climate adaptation, pest/pathogen monitoring, invasive species, inputs and outputs and pollination. Participants’ characteristics, motivations, study design and project outcomes in the reviewed articles were summarized and discussed. Both observational and experimental studies were represented in the articles, while emerging trends point towards field experimentation and ‘Large-N′ trials by lay farmers. Crowdsourcing lends itself to projects where the main role of the public is local visual observations and reporting, such as in pest/pathogen monitoring. Challenges included methodological issues such as validation procedures, but above all motivation, recruitment, and retention of volunteers. Despite the importance of participatory approaches for deeper citizen involvement for sustainability transitions and for the quality of knowledge outcomes, the role of citizens was overall restricted to data collection. Several of the methodologies proposed would be difficult to implement in low-income countries, and relatively few studies pertained to agricultural concerns of the global South. To lend value to farmers' time, we recommend projects relevant to livelihoods, health issues or local farming problems, accompanied by well-structured data feedback protocols, routing study results back to farmers.

农民作为研究志愿者可以潜在地为探索可持续农业研究问题提供丰富的资源。为了辨别基于公民科学的研究中与可持续农业相关的主题的新兴模式，并揭示进行此类研究的显着挑战和机遇，我们对2004-2019年期间从Google学术搜索中筛选的250篇出版物中的27篇文章进行了文献综述。这些文章按主题进行了主题归类：土壤健康，气候适应，害虫/病原体监测，入侵物种，投入和产出以及授粉。总结并讨论了参与者的特征，动机，研究设计和项目成果。文章包括观察性研究和实验性研究，而新兴的趋势则指向外地农民进行田间试验和“大N”试验。众包适用于公众主要角色是本地视觉观察和报告的项目，例如在有害生物/病原体监测中。挑战包括方法问题，例如验证程序，但最重要的是激励，招募和保留志愿者。尽管参与式方法对于使公民更深入地参与可持续性转变和知识成果的质量非常重要，但公民的作用总体上仅限于数据收集。所提出的几种方法在低收入国家将难以实施，而且与全球南方的农业问题相关的研究也相对较少。为了给农民的时间带来价值，