“Citizen science” refers to the participation of lay individuals in scientific studies and other activities having scientific objectives. Citizen science gives rise to unique ethical issues that stem from the potentially multifaceted contributions of citizen scientists to the research process. We sought to explore the ethical issues that are most concerning to citizen scientist practitioners, participants, and scholars to support ethical practices in citizen science. We developed a best–worst scaling experiment using a balanced incomplete block design and fielded it with respondents recruited through the U.S.-based Citizen Science Association. Respondents were shown repeated subsets of 11 ethical issues and identified the most and least concerning issues in each subset. Latent class analysis revealed two respondent classes. The “Power to the People” class was most concerned about power imbalance between project leaders and participants, exploitation of participants, and lack of diverse participation. The “Show Me the Data” class was most concerned about the quality of data generated by citizen science projects and failure of projects to share data and other research outputs.

“公民科学”是指非专业人士参与科学研究和其他具有科学目的的活动。公民科学引发了独特的伦理问题，这些问题源于公民科学家对研究过程的潜在多方面贡献。我们试图探索公民科学家从业者、参与者和学者最关心的伦理问题，以支持公民科学中的伦理实践。我们使用平衡的不完整块设计开发了一个最佳-最差缩放实验，并将其与通过美国公民科学协会招募的受访者一起进行。向受访者展示了 11 个道德问题的重复子集，并确定了每个子集中最相关和最不相关的问题。潜在类别分析揭示了两个受访者类别。“Power to the People”班最关心的是项目负责人与参与者权力不平衡、参与者被剥削、参与缺乏多元化。“Show Me the Data”课程最关注公民科学项目生成的数据质量，以及项目未能共享数据和其他研究成果。