Citizen science became a driving force for serious results in 2013, with an exponential increase in the number of mentions in published research: from fewer than 50 citations in 2009 to nearly 600 in 2013.
Increasingly, scientists are seeing potential in people power.
Wollertz / Shutterstock
“It would have taken our researchers 18 months to do what citizen scientists did in just three months,” says Amy Carton, citizen science lead at Cancer Research UK. Volunteers helped her team identify cancerous cells by looking at slides from drug trials in the online collaboration Cell Slider, results of which were presented in November at the National Cancer Research Institute’s annual conference.
Federal agencies including NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), as well as nongovernment platforms such as the new open-source site CrowdCrafting, substantially expanded the number and diversity of citizen science programs available in 2013.
At CrowdCrafting, for example, researchers can ...
