Improving the detection of collection-based citizen science projects

Citizen science (CS) is generally understood as public, volunteer participation in scientific research1,2. Kullenberg and Kasperowski demonstrated that citizen science is composed of three main strands of research – in one strand biology, conservation and ecology, and the other two strands being geoinformatics and social science combined with epidemiology3. Natural history collection based research, however, does not emerge in their analysis. They also performed an analysis of term co-occurrences from which some very relevant terms, such as „collections“ or „transcription“ are missing. The more general term “crowdsourcing”, though, is one of the most frequent terms pairing with other CS-related terms. Out of 1935 articles only two were about collection transcription (indicated directly in the title). To facilitate the current analysis, we will in the following sections describe the main types of collection-based citizen science that have direct impact on generating and mobilising of biodiversity data and the relative role of citizen scientists and professionals in this. Later, the aspect of data collection and data classification (or data interpretation) is taken into account separately, following Kosmala et al4 who used this approach for ecological studies.