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Are citizen science projects multi-disciplinary research activities?

by | Mar 15, 2021 | Frameworks & Definitions, Graphical article, Internal Content

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The majority (58%) of Zooniverse projects is multi-disciplinary

Most of the projects cover between 1 and 5 research areas 

Citizen science projects incorporate the perspectives of volunteers, practitioners, and scientists (among others) in different fields of science and applications. However, successful examples like “Galaxy Zoo” show that a narrow research orientation can help to streamline the crowd efforts and might lead to a higher scientific output. While examples like the Galaxy Zoo can be easily assigned to a single research area, other projects tend to have a multi-faceted or even multi-disciplinary orientation (e.g., the “Wild Mont-Blanc” project). In this work, we operationalised the question of multi-disciplinarity by assigning research areas to textual project descriptions based on computational text analytics. Thus, we identify a project as multi-disciplinary if it was assigned to more than one research area.

How to interpret this data 

We analysed 218 project descriptions using text-analytics based on explicit semantic analysis [1]. The research areas are mapped using the web of science taxonomy. This consists of research categories with a certain number of research areas per category. Figure 1 shows the relative amount of multi-disciplinary projects. 58% of the projects have been assigned to more than one research area and thus count as multi-disciplinary. Figure 2 presents the concrete numbers of projects that have a certain number of research areas. That some projects have a high number of associated research areas is caused by unclear textual project descriptions, which include many specific terms that are bound to the associated research areas.

References

[1] Gabrilovich, E., & Markovitch, S. (2007, January). Computing semantic relatedness using wikipedia-based explicit semantic analysis. In IJcAI (Vol. 7, pp. 1606-1611).

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We would like to inform that this project is inactive since December 2022. As a result, the content presented on this website is static, which means it cannot be updated, and no new information will be added. Consequently, interactive features such as the search function, or subscription and commenting capabilities are unavailable.