Page 61 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 44

060 Journal of Library Science in China, Vol.10, 2018

millions of people can fully play a part and the innovation may surge powerfully.” This paper
deems that citizen science project is able to well satisfy the demand of scientific innovation
and popularization. It will not only fuel scientific and technological progress and scientific
development, contributing to scientific and technological innovation advancing by leaps and
bounds, but will also greatly improve the scientific literacy and scientific spirit of the whole nation,
leading to achieving the goal of scientific popularization. Citizen science projects are usually
aimed at scientific discovery, based on the extensive participation of the public, and supported by
information communication technology (group collaboration technology, group decision-making
technology, semantic association technology, etc.). The interpretation and design of scientific
crowdsourcing is the premise and key point of a successful citizen science project. Compared
with the crowdsourcing activities in the traditional business context, scientific crowdsourcing
has stronger domain specificity, situational constraint and path dependence. Citizen science
projects based on the concept of scientific crowdsourcing also put forward higher requirements for
initiators (scientists and research teams), volunteers (amateurs and private scientists), platforms and
participating institutions. In view of this, the traditional crowdsourcing model and the operational
experience of crowdsourcing projects cannot effectively cope with and solve various problems
that citizen science projects may encounter in the business model and operational process from the
perspective of scientific crowdsourcing. This paper endeavors to make a conceptual exploration
and preliminary investigation of this emerging research topic and discuss several research and
development opportunities from the perspective of Library and Information Science.

1 Literature review

As of December 31, 2016, the number of search results on the Web of Science platform were
591, with search formula TS= (“citizen scien*” OR “crowd scien*” OR “crowd-sourced scien*”)
OR TI= (public participat* in scien*) and time span of all years. And 539 retrieval results were
obtained after careful screening. Data proved that during the eight years from 2009 to 2016,
research literature in English on citizen science kept increasing yearly and covered diverse fields,
such as Ornithology (Brossard, Lewenstein, & Bonney, 2005), Marine Science (Delaney, Sperling,
Adams, & Leung, 2008), Freshwater Science (Fore, Paulsen, & O’Laughlin, 2001), Ecology
(Cooper et al., 2007), Astronomy (Raddick et al., 2009) and Soil Science (Iii, Umek, Wise, &
Heneghan, 2016). Compared with the progress of citizen science research abroad, there were a few
studies in this realm in China, and relevant work was still in its infancy. Merely 20 results could
meet the requirements accurately after the related retrieval and the artificial data processing by
means of the advanced retrieval on CNKI, Wanfang and Vip Information database.