For info - highlighted in this month's Cornell Lab eNews - David
Cooper, C, Shirk, J & Zuckerberg, B 2014, 'The invisible
prevalence of citizen science in global research: migratory birds
and climate change', PLoS ONE, vol. 9, no. 9, p. e106508,
open access
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0106508
.
Abstract:
Citizen science is a research practice that relies on public
contributions of data. The strong recognition of its educational
value combined with the need for novel methods to handle subsequent
large and complex data sets raises the question: Is citizen science
effective at science? A quantitative assessment of the contributions
of citizen science for its core purpose – scientific research – is
lacking. We examined the contribution of citizen science to a review
paper by ornithologists in which they formulated ten central claims
about the impact of climate change on avian migration. Citizen
science was never explicitly mentioned in the review article. For
each of the claims, these ornithologists scored their opinions about
the amount of research effort invested in each claim and how
strongly the claim was supported by evidence. This allowed us to
also determine whether their trust in claims was, unwittingly or
not, related to the degree to which the claims relied primarily on
data generated by citizen scientists. We found that papers based on
citizen science constituted between 24 and 77% of the references
backing each claim, with no evidence of a mistrust of claims that
relied heavily on citizen-science data. We reveal that many of these
papers may not easily be recognized as drawing upon volunteer
contributions, as the search terms “citizen science” and “volunteer”
would have overlooked the majority of the studies that back the ten
claims about birds and climate change. Our results suggest that the
significance of citizen science to global research, an endeavor that
is reliant on long-term information at large spatial scales, might
be far greater than is readily perceived. To better understand and
track the contributions of citizen science in the future, we urge
researchers to use the keyword “citizen science” in papers that draw
on efforts of non-professionals.
--
David McDonald
1004 Norton Road
Wamboin NSW 2620
Australia
Mapcode: NSW G67T.M0Q
Coords: -35° 15.0573', 149° 21.9668'
T: (02) 6238 3706
M: 0416 231 890
F: (02) 9475 4274
E: m("dnmcdonald.id.au","david");">
☀Run, don't walk, to sign the MONSTER CLIMATE PETITION at monsterclimatepetition.com.au/, and invite your friends and family to do likewise!
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