Participation in Citizen Science: A Systematic Literature Review

The concept of citizen science emerged in the 1970s as a new approach to create science-society synergy and to generate more comprehensive data to support governmental decision-making. In recent years, the definition of citizen science has exceeded its original focus on information dissemination and has been extended to public engagement in collecting robust scientific data as well as the promotion of scientific knowledge co-creation (Dickinson et al., 2012). As an emerging institutional approach to “governing the production, use, management, and/or preservation of a particular type of resource (knowledge)” (p. 76, Madison et al., 2019), citizen science carries increasingly recognised relevance in public governance and policymaking for effective resource management. The impact and potential of citizen science have been recognised by recent literature across the aspects of public awareness, lower cost of data collection (Wehn et al., 2021), and democratisation of science (Scheibein et al., 2022). Public participation and bottom-up generation of data have been illustrated as a premise of what citizen science can achieve. However, how to achieve meaningful participation and optimise knowledge co-production remains an unclear subject in the current practice of citizen science. Existing critiques include questionable data quality in terms of data bias and consistency (Pocock et al., 2019), power imbalances among stakeholders, difficulties in sustainable knowledge transfer, and lack of public engagement longevity in citizen science projects (Vasiliades et al., 2021; Wuebben et al., 2020). These challenges often result in unmet expectations in the quality of participation of citizen science (Rosas et al., 2022; Vasiliades et al., 2021). Therefore, to identify the key variables associated with the quality of participation becomes a crucial subject of study for the planning, process management, and evaluation of citizen science. This research aims to identify the existing enabling and disabling factors associated with the quality of participation in citizen science. This systematic literature review includes 3,523 articles from Scopus, as the query result based on the keywords that include “citizen science”, “success/failure factors” and their synonyms. The full-article analysis is conducted based on the 291 relevant articles identified. The research output consists of an overview and in-depth analysis of the identified variables associated with public participation in citizen science. With these findings, this research aims to provide an overview of the key factors associated with the current challenges and opportunities in citizen science, and therewith to enrich the emerging field of citizen science research and to provide insights for more successful citizen science practice.