Page 73 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 44

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

studies, tasks are often treated as attributes of other entities, which to some extent conceal many
specific steps of operation, because in fact each entity is associated with the task. Therefore, in this
paper, the scientific task is designed as a weak entity (that is, it depends on a strong entity and can
also be an attribute of a strong entity), and it is related to the other four entities. Through the in-
depth exploration of the relations among five entities, this paper extracts twelve specific actions,
among which eight actions take place in the interaction process of two entities, while the other
four actions happen in the interaction process of three entities (see Figure 4). From the operational
process of citizen science project, the eight main steps include: ① The research team proposes
scientific tasks; ② The organization communicates with the research team to clarify scientific
tasks; ③ The organization designs scientific tasks on the basis of demand analysis of the research
team, that is, to define, clarify and decompose the tasks; ④ The institution develops or selects
relevant scientific crowdsourcing platform to carry out citizen science projects; ⑤ The research
team issues the designed scientific tasks on the platform; ⑥ The platform seeks relevant volunteers
and carries out task implementation; ⑦ The organization should provide necessary scientific
and information literacy training to relevant volunteers; and ⑧ Volunteers perform and complete
related scientific tasks. These eight actions constitute the basic process of citizen science project
operation.

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Figure 4. Operation mode of citizen science projects.

In addition, there are four actions that can further improve the efficiency and success rate of
citizen science projects: motivation, collaboration, evaluation and research data management.
These four actions are realized through the interaction of three entities, and each action needs to