Citizen Science: An Information Quality Research Frontier

Abstract: The rapid proliferation of online content producing and sharing technologies resulted in an explosion of user-generated content (UGC), which now extends to scientific data. Citizen science, in which ordinary people contribute information for scientific research, epitomizes UGC. Citizen science projects are typically open to everyone, engage diverse audiences, and challenge ordinary people to produce data of highest quality to be usable in science. This also makes citizen science a very exciting area to study both traditional and innovative approaches to information quality management. With this paper we position citizen science as a leading information quality research frontier. We also show how citizen science opens a unique opportunity for the information systems community to contribute to a broad range of disciplines in natural and social sciences and humanities.