This week I coded another 17 papers. So far I finished coding all the papers (N=36) which were found by using the key words, “citizen science” and “data quality”, to search in Scopus. While coding these papers helps me to understand each mechanism in the context of actual citizen science projects and develop definition for each mechanism, reading these papers also allows me to gain a fuzzy high level idea that which types of citizen science projects in which disciplines have major concern about data quality. I found that most of the papers among the 36 papers related to offline monitoring, such as monitoring animal, plant, and water quality. Only very limited ones are about pure online citizen science project. One obvious common characteristics of offline monitoring projects is that geographic information is very important. Most citizen science projects mentioned in those papers aim to answer research questions in the field of environmental science, ornithology, invasive plant, water quality, conservation, ecology, and etc. I can see that all of these citizen science projects care about nature. It is interesting that I did not see a citizen science project which is not related to nature and life science in these paper yet.
Next week, I will continuing focusing on coding the remaining papers searched by using different key words from the previous 36 papers. The two set of new key words we used are”volunteered geographic information” AND “data quality”, and “volunteer monitoring” AND “data quality”.