Citizen science: pathways to impact and why participant diversity matters

Citizen science (CS) is yet to fully understand the consequences of a lack of diversity in its participants. Addressing this knowledge gap, the authors of this paper focused on the potential impacts of CS and, using this as a starting point, moved to explore how CS participant recruitment and retention can affect not just short-term outcomes but also impact long-term achievements.

The authors undertook an extensive literature review using article abstracts, identifying categories of benefits, outcomes, or impacts of CS (outlined in Appendix A). Having identified these categories, they used these to describe how CS can achieve impact through different pathways; they then discussed how biases in participation can cascade through these pathways limiting the potential impact of any CS project.

The authors argued that, by developing pathways to impact, CS researchers can better anticipate and identify the potential negative consequences arising from a lack of participant diversity. They advocated that all CS practitioners should evaluate whether their studies are inclusive of diverse participants, and that these evaluations and reflections should be shared openly in order to benefit the CS field as a whole.