Scientific Landscape of Citizen Science Publications: Dynamics, Content and Presence in Social Media

Abstract

Citizen science (CS) aims primarily to create a new scientific culture able to improve upon the triple interaction between science, society, and policy in the dual pursuit of more democratic research and decision-making informed by sound evidence. It is both an aim and an enabler of open science (OS), to which it contributes by involving citizens in research and encouraging participation in the generation of new knowledge. This study analyses scientific output on CS using bibliometric techniques and Web of Science (WoS) data. Co-occurrence maps are formulated to define subject clusters as background for an analysis of the impact of each on social media. Four clusters are identified: HEALTH, BIO, GEO and PUBLIC. The profiles for the four clusters are observed to be fairly similar, although BIO and HEALTH are mentioned more frequently in blogposts and tweets and BIO and PUBLIC in Facebook and newsfeeds. The findings also show that output in the area has grown since 2010, with a larger proportion of papers (66%) mentioned in social media than reported in other studies. The percentage of open access documents (30.7%) is likewise higher than the overall mean for all areas.

Disparate Environmental Monitoring as a Barrier to the Availability and Accessibility of Open Access Data on the Tidal Thames

“…Simultaneously, with the rapid growth of the Internet and social media platforms, the scientific and political worlds are experiencing greater levels of public engagement [4,5]. As society becomes more interconnected, its citizens are calling for greater transparency and participation in the decision-making processes, giving rise to the "Open Access movement" [6,7]. The Open Access movement began in the nineties and continues to the present [1,8].…”

“…Allowing open access to data, reports, and findings increases research visibility and encourages more participatory research [1,10,11]. Public engagement, especially in the natural sciences, is rapidly growing in sectors such as non-governmental organizations and charities through citizen science activities [7,8,11].…”

“…The scientific community has taken notice of the positive impacts of citizen science, such as the ability to collect large-scale and long-term data sets [4,7,8]. Presently, citizen science is increasingly being used as a tool by researchers, with the number of publications mentioning citizen science growing in the past ten years.…”

“…Presently, citizen science is increasingly being used as a tool by researchers, with the number of publications mentioning citizen science growing in the past ten years. This growth can be attributed to more funding initiatives that incorporate citizen engagement, greater availability of low-cost technologies, and leveraging citizen participation to collect large-scale data [4,7,8]. Besides contributing to new research, citizen science has also been used to empower local communities and redirect research priorities and policy [1,[12][13][14].…”

“…Presently, citizens are not just involved in data collection; their participation is expanding to data analysis and interpretation [11,14,15]. Groups of citizens concerned about environmental issues can now access the technologies and data necessary to develop their own analyses, draw their own conclusions, and share their findings on social media [6,7,11,15]. Environmental data, however, are often challenging to analyze because of the complexity of the measured systems and other factors with which citizens may be unfamiliar, such as seasonality, extreme weather events, and natural variation.…”