Crowdsourcing in Science: Synthesis, Typology, Significance for School Openness

Author(s):

Regina Lenart-Gansiniec(presenting / submitting)

Conference:

ECER 2021

Network:

22. Research in Higher Education

Format:

Paper

Session Information

22 SES 07 A, Paper Session

Paper Session

Time:

2021-09-07

14:00-15:30

Room:

n/a

Chair:

Rosemary Deem

Contribution

Research on crowdsourcing in management and quality sciences has been conducted intensively for ten years and the number of publications on crowdsourcing is constantly growing . The increasing interest among the researchers was initiated in 2006 by the editor of “Wired” magazine, Howe. In his article entitled “The rise of crowdsourcing”, he described the organizations that use crowdsourcing to source ideas from the virtual community. Two years later, in 2008, Howe, in the foreword to his book entitled “Crowdsourcing. Why The Power of The Crowd is Driving the Future of Business”, wrote the following among other things, “I had often said that crowdsourcing could be applied to anything reducible to bits and bytes, but not products measured in pounds and ounces. But after that phone call I changed my maxim. Crowdsourcing's limits are determined by people's passion and imagination, which is to say, there aren't any limits at all”. Howe claimed that “the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call” has some unlimited possibilities of application, and its potential may be also used by commercial and governmental organizations. In recent years, crowdsourcing has become an integral part of academics’ daily lives, thus becoming one of the fastest growing tools to support scientific research. The literature stresses that crowdsourcing in science as one of the types of civic science is an alternative to research projects, a strategy for the organization of researchers' work and a tool for research. Furthermore, crowdsourcing in science is a tool for creating online content, for communication between academic teachers and with from outside of the scientific community, for collection of observational data or classification of pictures in response to researcher’s questions, the practice of obtaining participants, services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people, especially via the Internet.

Method

We performed a systematic literature review that identified a total of 63 articles published between 2006 and 2021, which were then selected for the study.

Expected Outcomes

The main contribution of this concept article is to develop crowdsourcing typologies in science that really remove significant barriers to further exploration and exemplification of crowdsourcing in science.

References

Behrend, TS, Sharek, DJ, Meade, AW, & Wiebe, EN 2011, 'The viability of crowdsourcing for survey research', Behavior Research Methods, vol. 43, no. 3, pp. 800. Crowston, K, Østerlund, C, Lee, T, Jackson, C, Harandi, M, Allen, S, Bahaadini, S, Coughlin, S, Katsaggelos, A, Larson, S, Rohani, N, Smith, J, Trouille, L, & Zevin, M 2019, 'Knowledge Tracing to Model Learning in Online Citizen Science Projects', IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies, vol. 13, pp. 123-134. Franzoni, C, & Sauermann, H 2014, 'Crowd science: The organization of scientific research in open collaborative projects', Research Policy, vol. 43, no. 1, pp. 1-20. Howe, J. (2006) The Rise of Crowdsourcing. Sauermann, H & Franzoni, C 2015, 'Crowd science user contribution patterns and their implications', Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 112. Sauermann, H, Franzoni, C, & Shafi, K 2019, 'Crowdfunding scientific research: Descriptive insights and correlates of funding success', PLOS ONE, vol. 14, no. 1, pp. e0208384. Schlagwein, D, & Daneshgar, F 2014, 'User Requirements of a Crowdsourcing Platform for researchers: Findings from a Series of Focus Groups'. PACIS. See, L., Mooney, P., Foody, G., Bastin, L., Comber, A., Estima, J., Fritz, S., Kerle, N., Jiang, B., Laakso, M., Liu, H.-Y., Milcinski, G., Niksic, M., Painho, M., Pődör, A., Olteanu Raimond, A.-M. and Rutzinger, M. (2016) 'Crowdsourcing, Citizen Science or Volunteered Geographic Information? The Current State of Crowdsourced Geographic Information', ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information, vol. 55, no. 5. Sheehan, KB 2018, 'Crowdsourcing research: Data collection with Amazon’s Mechanical Turk', Communication Monographs, vol. 85, no. 1, pp. 140-156. Steelman, Z, Hammer, B, & Limayem, M 2014, 'Data Collection in the Digital Age: Innovative Alternatives to Student Samples', MIS Quarterly, vol. 38, no. 2, pp. 355-378. Uhlmann, EL, Ebersole, CR, Chartier, CR, Errington, TM, Kidwell, MC, Lai, CK, McCarthy, RJ, Riegelman, A, Silberzahn, R, & Nosek, BA 2019, 'Scientific Utopia III: Crowdsourcing Science', Perspectives on Psychological Science, vol. 14, no. 5, pp. 711-733. Waldrop, M 2008, 'Science 2.0', Scientific American, vol. 298, no. 5, pp. 68-73. Webster, J & Watson, R 2002, 'Analyzing the Past to Prepare for the Future: Writing a Literature Review', MIS Quarterly, 26. Wiggins, A & Crowston, K 2011, 'From Conservation to Crowdsourcing: A Typology of Citizen Science', 44th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Kauai, HI, 2011, pp. 1-10.

Author Information

Regina Lenart-Gansiniec (presenting / submitting)

Jagiellonian University

Krakow

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