What is Citizen Science?#
Parts of this lesson were adapted from a longer blog post Caroline Nickerson wrote for CitSci.
What is Research?#
If you’re thinking about doing citizen science, you might ask yourself: What is research?
In simple terms, research is a systematic way of investigating the world to create new knowledge
And why do research? For a number of reasons:
Because you are curious or concerned about something!
Because you want to understand a problem or topic.
Because you want a foundation built on knowledge to make decisions.
Some people are professional researchers working for universities, nonprofits, governments, or companies, but others are researchers without a special background or even institutional support.
Anyone, from any background, can volunteer to engage in research projects, or even start their own. Anyone can create knowledge! This is often done through citizen science.
What is Citizen Science?#
Citizen science goes by a few different names. It can be: community, neighborhood, crowdsourced, participatory, and/or public science.
There are good faith debates out there about what is the best term to use (or what these different terms mean), but a working definition of citizen science for an educator could be: “how any member of the public contributes to scientific discovery, often by collecting, analyzing, or somehow working with data.” And remember, data is just information about the world!
Some citizen science projects are small and local (with only a few people in a certain place participating), but some are big and global. The big projects often rely on crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing is the “the process of outsourcing tasks to a distributed group of people.”
Image source: Rob Cottingham
A lot of citizen science also involves community-based monitoring, described as when “…concerned citizens, government agencies, industry, academia, community groups, and local institutions collaborate to monitor, track, and respond to issues of common community concern.”
In other words, many communities use citizen science to pay extra-close attention to an issue that matters to them, like sea-level rise (or mosquito habitats! Tracking mosquito habitats helps us predict where mosquito-borne illness might occur).
In citizen science, participation can range from contractual, where communities commission researchers to conduct studies; contributory, where volunteers primarily collect data; collaborative, where participants may also help refine project design or analyze results; co-created, where scientists and community members jointly design and carry out research; to collegial, where non-credentialed individuals conduct independent research (Bonney et al. and Shirk et al. really articulate these frameworks well).
Sauermann and Poetz (initially in an article with Franzoni, and then expanded on in their book) developed a helpful model showing how members of the public (including at scale through the lens of crowd science, or with smaller teams) can be involved at any stage of the research process, from identifying questions to analyzing data to sharing results.
But beyond when people participate, Sauermann and Poetz also introduced a framework for understanding how they contribute: the AKRD model.
AKRD stands for:
Activities – the actual tasks the crowd members/participants perform (like taking photos of wildlife or transcribing historical documents)
Knowledge – what people know and bring to the project (including lived experience, local expertise, or disciplinary training)
Resources – what people have access to (like smartphones, tools, transportation, or even funding)
Decisions – the ability to help shape the project, whether through setting priorities, refining methods, or choosing how results are used
Participants often contribute through activities (like data collection), but they also bring unique knowledge about their communities, and sometimes make key decisions about what to investigate and why. Understanding these different forms of contribution helps educators create more meaningful, inclusive citizen science experiences, and helps citizen scientists see themselves as full participants in the scientific process.
The CitSci team often uses a graphic that outlines how different types of citizen science projects fall under different frameworks:
This table was developed in part based on Shirk et al.
The biggest takeaway from all this is that citizen science makes a difference and advances knowledge.
Because of citizen scientists, we now know (and shout out to Caren Cooper for helping flag some of the outcomes on this list!):
One-third of bird species are at risk of extinction (Audubon)
New species of birds, trees, earthworms, and more have been discovered (Australian Geographic)
50+ types of bacteria live in your belly button (Dunn Lab)
The first flowering of 19 species of plants has moved 9 days earlier over the past decade, indicating climate change (Gonsamo et al.)
There’s a new type of aurora in the night sky (and the citizen scientists named it Steve!) (NOAA)
There’s another Jupiter-sized planet (TESS)
Invasive mosquito species have arrived in Germany (Mückenatlas)
Alzheimer’s research is 6x faster than it would be at Cornell’s Schaffer – Nishimura Lab (Stall Catchers)
Citizen Science Data#
Data is information.
Information = words and pictures (qualitative data)
Information = numbers and measurements (quantitative data)
Much of citizen science involves the collection and analysis of data. Data collection can be as simple as taking pictures of plants with a smartphone, or as complex as doing a full water quality sample with a kit.
Data analysis also can be simple or complex: you can be clicking on blood vessels to find stalls for Alzheimer’s researchers, or you can be solving complex problems yourself to help synthesize RNA-based vaccines.
Anyone can do citizen science by collecting or analyzing data, if they follow the instructions.
It’s up to the researcher making a project to create instructions that facilitate meaningful participation (and mitigate possible data collection or analysis mistakes).
We think GLOBE Observer has done a great job with their research design, which is one reason they’re the featured project for the EMERGE campaign.
Continue to explore the curriculum to dive in to our featured citizen science project, GLOBE Observer!
But what about all the other citizen science projects out there? And have you ever considered starting your own?
Finding an Existing Citizen Science Project#
You can certainly start your own citizen science project, but before you do, we recommend that you see what’s already out there.
There are thousands of local and global citizen science projects in the world, spanning every topic from astronomy to agriculture.
Some projects you can do in the field with a smartphone app or a paper datasheet, some are experiment-based (meaning you’re testing a statement that we believe to be true about the world – a hypothesis) or observational (to understand what’s going on in your community), and others are entirely online, involving data analysis, image tagging, or transcription.
With so many choices, it might be difficult to decide on the right project for you or your community. The good news? If a project truly doesn’t exist that offers what you’re looking for, you can start your own, and several platforms make that easy (cough cough CitSci! We’ll explain more later in this post).
Here are four trusted places to begin exploring:
CitSci – CitSci is a website and app where anyone can start, manage, or join a citizen science project.. CitSci supports collaborative, community-based science and flexible project design.
SciStarter – SciStarter connects volunteers to over 3,000 citizen science projects, events, and tools. SciStarter also partners with NASA, Verizon, libraries, Girl Scouts, and others to offer engaging content. Many of our EMERGE materials are meant to support SciStarter Ambassadors, who are highly motivated volunteers trying to get others involved in citizen science.
Zooniverse – Zooniverse is an online platform for people-powered research. Volunteers can contribute to ongoing projects in fields like astronomy, biology, history, and climate science—usually by analyzing images, transcribing documents, or tagging patterns.
Federal Citizen Science Catalog – Managed by the U.S. General Services Administration, this catalog lists federally supported citizen science and crowdsourcing projects.
Using SciStarter (to find an existing project) & CitSci (to find an existing project or start your own)#
To summarize above content, there are three steps you can take to immediately engage in citizen science.
Find an existing project (SciStarter or CitSci)
Analyze citizen science data (CitSci)
Create own project (CitSci)
SciStarter#
Let’s start with the SciStarter resources. Our first recommendation is to use SciStarter to find an existing project that is a good fit for you; you don’t want to reinvent the wheel, and ideally you can learn something about your community while also contributing to a bigger global goal by joining an existing project.
SciStarter connects citizen scientists to over 2,000 projects, events, and tools. It’s the world’s largest searchable citizen science database, and it includes projects from all sorts of other platforms, including CitSci and Zooniverse.
You can start with the project finder and search topics that you’re interested in. If you’re an educator, make sure you select the “has classroom materials” filter. Not every project has been intentional about designing themselves for people to learn as they participate – and that’s not necessarily a bad thing – but those that do actually have better outcomes.
Some other SciStarter resources that can get you started include:
The Field Guide to Citizen Science book
All the trainings
In higher ed? Pay special attention to that training
One Million Acts of Science each April
CitSci#
After exploring SciStarter, you might be wondering:
Is there a platform where I can both find citizen science projects and build my own?
What if I want to dive deeper, by analyzing real data?
That’s where CitSci.org comes in.
CitSci is both a website and an app designed for researchers, educators, community groups, and anyone curious about the world around them. It’s a platform where you can:
Start your own citizen science project
Join and contribute to existing projects
Analyze data collected by others
While SciStarter helps you find projects across many platforms (including ones from CitSci), on CitSci, you can not only find projects that people have used CitSci to create, but also create your own project and use free tools to analyze data contributed by the global community (for public projects, or for projects you create).
To get started, we recommend heading over to CitSci’s homepage and creating an account. Then, you can explore featured global projects and other projects that might pertain to your locality.
The CitSci team wrote a blog post to help you create your first project and datasheet.