Page 64 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 44

ZHAO Yuxiang / A preliminary exploration on citizen science projects based on scientific crowdsourcing perspectives: 063
Conceptualization, pattern design and research opportunities

(Laut, Cappa, Nov, & Porfiri, 2017). The process design and operation management of the project
are also more flexible, and the citizen science paradigm is able to largely mobilize the collision
and integration of collective intelligence and produce unexpected results, especially when facing
interdisciplinary and cross-domain research topics (Couvet, Jiguet, Julliard, Levrel, & Teyssèdre,
2008; Chow, Chong, Cook, & White, 2014). Bonney et al. (2009) classify citizen science
projects into three main categories: contribution work, collaboration work and co-creation work.
Subsequently, Shirk et al. (2012) propose five types of citizen science projects, namely contractual
project, contribution project, collaborative project, joint innovative project and consensus project,
and construct the corresponding citizen science operation implementation framework.

1.3 Reflection on the existing work

To sum up, in the past decade, citizen science has evolved from an emerging concept into a
powerful tool for group collaboration in the Internet environment. However, there are still multiple
difficulties and challenges to be solved in the operation mechanism and management of citizen
science projects due to the diversity of initiators, the universality and heterogeneity of participants,
and the complexity and dynamics of the implementation process. The existing studies are limited in
both theory and practice. First, from a theoretical perspective, although citizen science and scientific
crowdsourcing have been used interchangeably in many studies (Hu & Tang, 2015; Silvertown,
2009; Brossar, Lewenstein, & Bonney, 2005), the two concepts are not entirely equivalent. This
paper holds that citizen science is more interpreted as a research object in existing studies, while
scientific crowdsourcing is mainly seen as a research perspective, namely, the contextualization of
the crowdsourcing model in the field of scientific research, and the scientific crowdsourcing model
has stronger domain and path-dependent characteristics. Digging deeper into model building and
management mechanism of citizen science projects requires a systematic research on the theoretical
basis of crowdsourcing and a probe into the theoretical mapping between citizen science projects
and scientific crowdsourcing, or the research of citizen science projects will inevitably be limited to
operational details and trivial issues without sufficient theoretical support and basis. Secondly, from
the perspective of practice, citizen science projects are mainly carried out in the realm of natural
science, while there are few cases in the fields of social science and digital humanities. Therefore,
the operational mechanism and management countermeasures of citizen science projects are often
largely characterized by regional identity and the extension and popularization of their research
findings and experience recaps are far from enough.

2 Theoretical perspective of citizen science: Analysis of scientific crowdsourcing
concept

At present, the concepts of scientific crowdsourcing and citizen science are often used