Over the past decade, citizen science has experienced growth and popularity as a scientific practice and as a new form of stakeholder engagement and public participation in science or in the generation of new knowledge. One of the key requirements for realising the potential of citizen science is evidence and demonstration of its impact and value. Yet the actual changes resulting from citizen science interventions are often assumed, ignored or speculated about. Based on a systematic review of 77 publications, combined with empirical insights from 10 past and ongoing projects in the field of citizen science, this paper presents guidelines for a consolidated Citizen Science Impact Assessment framework to help overcome the dispersion of approaches in assessing citizen science impacts; this comprehensive framework enhances the ease and consistency with which impacts can be captured, as well as the comparability of evolving results across projects. Our review is framed according to five distinct, yet interlinked, impact domains (society, economy, environment, science and technology, and governance). Existing citizen science impact assessment approaches provide assessment guidelines unevenly across the five impact domains, and with only a small number providing concrete indicator-level conceptualisations. The analysis of the results generates a number of salient insights which we combine in a set of guiding principles for a consolidated impact assessment framework for citizen science initiatives. These guiding principles pertain to the purpose of citizen science impact assessments, the conceptualisation of data collection methods and information sources, the distinction between relative versus absolute impact, the comparison of impact assessment results across citizen science projects, and the incremental refinement of the organising framework over time.

在过去的十年中，公民科学作为一种科学实践以及利益相关者参与和公众参与科学或产生新知识的一种新形式而经历了增长和普及。实现公民科学潜力的关键要求之一是对其影响和价值的证据和证明。但是，人们通常会假设，忽略或推测公民科学干预措施产生的实际变化。在对77篇出版物进行系统综述的基础上，结合来自公民科学领域的10个过去和正在进行的项目的经验见解，本白皮书提出了综合公民科学影响评估框架的指南，以帮助克服评估公民科学影响的方法的分散性; 这个全面的框架提高了捕获影响的简便性和一致性，并提高了整个项目中不断发展的结果的可比性。我们的审查是根据五个不同但相互关联的影响领域（社会，经济，环境，科学技术和治理）来制定的。现有的公民科学影响评估方法在五个影响领域中提供的评估指南不均，只有很少一部分提供了具体的指标级概念。对结果的分析产生了许多显着的见解，我们将其结合到一套指导原则中，以形成针对公民科学计划的综合影响评估框架。这些指导原则与公民科学影响评估的目的有关，