Knowledge collaboration between professionals and non-professionals: A systematic mapping review of citizen science, crowd sourcing and community-driven research

This paper presents a mapping review of status and trends in research of citizen science, crowdsourcing or community-driven research from 2013–2018. Understanding this field is central in relation to the current trend of developing games for citizen science. The focus of the review has been on identifying themes, trends and gaps in this knowledge collaboration field in general and in relation to learning and education in specific. 240 studies were identified through iterative searches and screening processes, and 15 themes were identified through grounded-theory inspired analysis: 1. Motivation; 2. Evaluation; 3. Education and learning; 4. Man-machine collaboration; 5. Participant experience; 6. Impact on research; 7. CS technologies; 8. Big data; 9. System or project design; 10. Social media; 11. Participant development of research; 12. Behaviour; 13. Ethics; 14; Cross-disciplinary partnerships; 15. Organizational change. Because our focus was on learning, we defined themes with a focus on traditional educational activity and new forms of learning in the field. The review both reveals central discussions on the potentials of technology in citizen science learning and application of new types of technologies. Results related to citizen science learning showed that value is added in to knowledge generation by the collective process of a crowd with multiple competences. This is specifically through two types of processes: social learning, and learning from experience. These results point to that it is central to focus on defining various groups of participant skills when designing citizen science systems and determining what processes users are able to participate in and what additional training or education are needed for participants to contribute to more sophisticated processes. The review also reveals that technologies will play an increasingly greater role in crowd sourcing in both research and business. There are central discussions on whether the active input and participation of users will be transformed to more passive inputs with involvement of passive sources of data generated by existing and new types of sensor technologies, bots, artificial intelligence and other types of technology. In the context of this review, the IOT development of what is called ‘the next generation of CrS’ also raises a number of questions in relation to learning. With a focus on types of participation in learning and educational processes the ‘active’ versus ‘passive’ input becomes a challenge that must be addressed. The results presented in this paper are central as a background study in relation to technology involving communities such as the current trend of developing citizen science games.