The Potential for Citizen Science in Information Systems Research

Abstract

Abstract:In this paper, we explicate citizen science in information systems research. Citizen science in IS research is a partnership between IS researchers and people in their everyday lives. Citizen science projects in the IS field are defined by phenomenon that interest both citizens and scientists and by the intervention of citizens in scientific processes for the purposes of scientific literacy and a more informed citizenry. We make the case for citizen science as part of a movement in IS research towards societally impactful research at the confluence of human behavior, technology, society, and environmental sustainability. We discuss the origins of citizen involvement in science and contemporary notions of citizen science from sociological, natural science, and public policy perspectives to build a working definition for the IS field. We provide examples of how one can leverage citizen science in IS research and discuss larger ideas for the possibility of citizen science.

Citizen Science: An Information Quality Research Frontier

“…As with any complex social phenomena, citizen science is more than just data collection and information quality. It also includes considerations of the engagement of volunteers in doing research; increasing public trust in the scientific enterprise; co-creation of scientific endeavors; engagement of the public in policies and debates arising as a result of science; building communities; involving people in addressing climate change and environmental sustainability; fostering education, literacy, and awareness of science among the general population (Bonney et al 2009;Irwin 1995;Irwin and Michael 2003;Levy and Germonprez 2017;Sieber 2006). While these are important to the phenomenon and practice of citizen science, conducting research in information quality in citizen science holds undisputed value among scientists, and IS researchers are particularly well positioned to conduct research affecting the core issue in this emerging field.…”

“…Of these, topics of interest for IS included Information Quality, Users, Ubiquitous Computing, Crowdsourcing, Social Computing, and Design. Among IS publications, the primary themes included Design (7), Information Quality (3), Social Computing (2), Crowdsourcing (1), Games (1), Open Source Software (1), Users (1), and a general perspective article (Levy and Germonprez 2017). Across the entire data set, the topic of Information Quality appeared 49 times, including 29 Conservation papers where it was a more common primary focus than species groups or habitats, and 15 papers in Computing, although Information Quality was in fact a dominant theme in far more publications than was captured by this analysis.…”

“…Given its inherent disciplinary roots, many studies in citizen science utilize language, concepts and pursue objectives very different from that of the IQ tradition in IS. Indeed, even the very term Bcitizen science^has multiple dimensions and interpretations (Eitzel et al 2017;Kullenberg and Kasperowski 2016;Levy and Germonprez 2017;, as indicated by a variety of labels each with its own accent and flavor, including volunteer surveys (Lewandowski and Specht 2015), citizen focus groups (Heikkila and Isett 2007), volunteered geographic information (Goodchild 2007), participatory Geoweb (Parfitt 2013), civic science (Clark and Illman 2001), and scientific crowdsourcing (Sabou et al 2012). Yet, as argued earlier, this diversity makes this research area quite a productive source of original ideas.…”

Open Science and Open Innovation in a socio‐political context: knowledge production for societal impact in an age of post‐truth populism

“…Delfanti () argues that citizen science, where individuals collect data for organised scientific projects such as collecting wildlife data, is giving way to a new context for scientific inquiry in which non‐scientists organise themselves outside the traditional academic space to produce knowledge. Levy and Germonprez () add granularity to the concept by identifying citizen science characteristics, and an associated definition, that can be applied to the technology field. The rise of citizen science, epitomised by the activities of garage biologists, provides another challenge to the institutional processes of knowledge production regimes.…”

New Guidelines for Null Hypothesis Significance Testing in Hypothetico-Deductive IS Research

“…This trend is evidenced, for example, in the emergent number of IS research articles on these topics in our own journals (e.g., Berente et al, 2019;Howison et al, 2011;Levy & Germonprez, 2017;Lukyanenko, Parsons, Wiersma, & Maddah, 2019). statistics for analysis, how we report results, and how we publish.…”