Over the last week, our group has kept on coding the selected papers for the meta-analysis. As we know, meta-analysis is an iterative process for us to make consensus on coding scheme. Thus, it is critical to set a set of rule for coding. As for me, I have coded 45 papers so far and found that it is important to decide the criteria of acceptance and rejection in terms of mechanisms that each paper had made for assuring data quality in citizen science. With regard to this issue, I have prepared 6 topics such as whether we will include simply proposed or revised mechanisms in the review papers and led the discussion during the weekly meeting. We made a lot of progress on the criteria for the next round of the process, although we could not make the final agreement.
In the next week, I will continue coding more papers and will start to write about our working procedure and progress. The criteria that our group made will also be included in the writing. I will also continue learning the statistical programming environment R, as we have to utilize its functionalities of statistical analysis and visualization. I found very useful online course for R which is provided by the Coursera, one of the largest MOOC sites. Here is the link: https://class.coursera.org/rprog-004.