ABSTRACT

Research projects that actively involve ‘crowds’ or non-professional ‘citizen scientists’ are attracting growing attention. Such projects promise to increase scientific productivity while also connecting science with the general public. We make three contributions. First, we argue that the largely separate literatures on ‘Crowd Science’ and ‘Citizen Science’ investigate strongly overlapping sets of projects but take different disciplinary lenses. Closer integration can enrich research on Crowd and Citizen Science (CS). Second, we propose a framework to profile projects with respect to four types of crowd contributions: activities, knowledge, resources, and decisions. This framework also accommodates machines and algorithms, which increasingly complement or replace professional and non-professional researchers as a third actor. Finally, we outline a research agenda anchored on important underlying organisational challenges of CS projects. This agenda can advance our understanding of Crowd and Citizen Science, yield practical recommendations for project design, and contribute to the broader organisational literature.

摘要

积极参与“人群”或非专业“公民科学家”的研究项目正在引起越来越多的关注。此类项目有望提高科学生产力，同时还将科学与公众联系起来。我们做出三个贡献。首先，我们认为关于“人群科学”和“公民科学”的大部分独立文献研究了高度重叠的项目集，但采用了不同的学科视角。更紧密的整合可以丰富对人群和公民科学 (CS) 的研究。其次，我们提出了一个框架来描述关于四种人群贡献的项目：活动、知识、资源和决策。该框架还包含机器和算法，它们越来越多地补充或取代专业和非专业研究人员作为第三者。最后，我们概述了以 CS 项目的重要潜在组织挑战为基础的研究议程。该议程可以促进我们对人群和公民科学的理解，为项目设计提供实用的建议，并为更广泛的组织文献做出贡献。