Citizen Science: Crowdsourcing for Research
23 May 2018
This report looks at the practical applications of citizen science in research. It includes advice for designing and implementing citizen science projects and how to evaluate success.
Citizen science: crowdsourcing for research
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A range of disciplines can benefit from crowdsourcing, including astronomy, ecology, history, medicine and political science.
Through a rapid review of the available literature and interviews with four experts, researchers compiled a practical overview of crowdsourcing in citizen science. The report highlights the benefits of crowdsourcing, best tools to use, and best practices.
Background
Crowdsourcing is a beneficial research method that allows members of the public to contribute ideas and time to projects despite not being formally trained experts. A range of research projects have already successfully employed this method in their work.
Goals
RAND Europe’s work provides a practical overview of crowdsourcing in citizen science. The work, conducted on behalf of THIS Institute (The Healthcare Improvement Studies Institute), covers useful tools for crowdsourcing, good practices to undertake and up-to-date practical references on designing crowdsourcing-based research programmes.
Findings
Benefits
Crowdsourcing allows researchers to collect and analyse data on a much larger scale meaning efficiency gains can be made in terms of speed, throughput and cost.
A range of disciplines can benefit from crowdsourcing, including astronomy, ecology, history, medicine and political science.
Citizen science can build public trust in research. By involving non-researchers in the scientific process, researchers can understand perspectives of the public and the public’s scientific understanding improves.
Best tools
Citizen science platforms host a range of projects to help with project building and hosting capabilities. These platforms are a useful resource for members of the public who want to discover projects or for researchers who want to create projects.
Systematic review platforms combine crowdsourcing and systematic review processes. These platforms save time and money, as well as reducing expert reviewers’ workloads.
Labour market platforms can be used to annotate text, complete surveys or perform other short tasks. Managers who use this platform can recruit large groups of people to complete specific tasks without making them part of a permanent workforce.
Best practices
It is important to maintain data quality and scientific rigour in crowdsourcing projects. Monitoring data gathering, simplifying tasks and using statistical checks are some of the ways to ensure data quality.
Motivated and engaged participants are critical to the success of crowdsourcing projects. A key way to do this is to create interesting tasks and show appreciation.
Consensus in citizen science is that evaluating projects is paramount. Evaluations can show how well projects have worked and inform the work of future projects using crowdsourcing.
Methodology
For this research, we conducted a rapid review of the available literature and interviewed four crowdsourcing experts. The experts are all people involved in managing different types of projects of online tools that take advantage of crowdsourcing in their research.
