Citizen Science refers to the involvement of members of the general public (“citizens”) in the scientific research process. It is a form of public participation that works across many disciplines and that comes with different flavors and names, including community based research, crowd-sourced data collection, civic science, and more.
Citizen Science projects come in different forms, involving different degrees of collaboration between project organizers and project participants, and with different levels of quality for the produced scientific result. Several classifications exist in the literature, ladders that reflect the increasing level of involvement of participants in the different phases of the scientific research process.