What Is Citizen Science Good For? Birds, Butterflies, Big Data

No matter how unhip you feel wearing waders or hauling a butterfly net, citizen science is cool. That's obvious from the boom in online projects that let you count penguins, hunt planets, or identify animals in the Serengeti, as well as the scientific papers using these data. Now researchers in Sweden have looked into the science of citizen science itself. How much of this volunteer research is really happening, they asked—and what is it producing? Christopher Kullenberg and Dick Kasperowski, at Sweden's University of Gothenburg, started their investigation by digging through scientific citations to find citizen science projects. They used an index called Web of Science. They were looking for any projects in which volunteers collected or classified data for scientists to analyze. But people don't always call this "citizen science." It might show up as "civic science," "crowd science," "street science," "DIY science," or even "community-based auditing." Using these ...