Evaluation on crowdsourcing research: Current status and future direction

Crowdsourcing’s ten years in: A review

“…The definition of crowdsourcing as well as some ‘traditional’ examples of crowdsourcing, such as Wikipedia, are highly debated; this is likely due to both the relative newness of the term and the flexibility and adaptability of the method [1,5,7,8,10–12,20,40–43]. To further complicate authors’ attempts to define crowdsourcing, there are a variety of related concepts that have been used synonymously, including: citizen science, health 2.0, wisdom of the crowds, peer production, open sourcing, expert sourcing, collective intelligence, human computation, community–based participatory research, participatory epidemiology, outsourcing and open sourcing [1,3,7,12,43].…”

“…Although some authors believe that crowdsourcing is a special form of outsourcing [3], many authors conclude that the major difference between crowdsourcing and outsourcing is the presence of a contract [10]. In addition, in a crowdsourcing exercise, the organisation or crowdsourcing initiator has the rights to whatever is produced and the crowd is aware of this [10].…”

“…Although some authors believe that crowdsourcing is a special form of outsourcing [3], many authors conclude that the major difference between crowdsourcing and outsourcing is the presence of a contract [10]. In addition, in a crowdsourcing exercise, the organisation or crowdsourcing initiator has the rights to whatever is produced and the crowd is aware of this [10]. Intellectual property rights are also one of the major differences between crowdsourcing and open sourcing or peer–production, along with the hierarchical structure of crowdsourcing [1,10].…”

“…In addition, in a crowdsourcing exercise, the organisation or crowdsourcing initiator has the rights to whatever is produced and the crowd is aware of this [10]. Intellectual property rights are also one of the major differences between crowdsourcing and open sourcing or peer–production, along with the hierarchical structure of crowdsourcing [1,10]. In open–sourcing or peer–production, the product that is being worked on is free, will remain free and the crowd that is working on it volunteers their labour to make the free product better.…”

“…As previous authors had reported few search results in indexed journals [10,27,39] and crowdsourcing is a new method, semantic searches in Google Scholar were used to retrieve both peer–reviewed and grey literature published on crowdsourcing. “Crowdsourcing” as well as ‘crowdsourcing’ joint with health terms, such as genetics, diagnosis, epidemiology, surveillance, public health and disease were searched in August, 2015.…”