Bravo, Pedro and Ghilardi-Lopes, Natalia Pirani
(2025)
Beyond reliability: towards a broader epistemic evaluation of citizen science.
Aurora, 37.
ISSN 2965-1557
Abstract
Citizen science has been one of the main forms of public participation in scientific research. The inclusion of non-professional scientists in this context has, however, generated concerns about the reliability of its results, and a great part of the literature has been investigating it. In this paper, we aim to provide a more comprehensive epistemic evaluation of citizen science by discussing standards other than reliability. To do this, we refer to Alvin Goldman’s social veristic epistemology and its fivestandards for epistemically evaluating social practices or institutions: reliability (the ratio of results to total number of results and errors fostered by a practice), power (the practice’s ability to help cognizers find results that answer the questions that interest them), fecundity (the practice’s ability to lead to large numbers of results for many practitioners), speed (how quickly a practice leads to results), and efficiency (how well a practice limits the cost of getting results). By applying it to the citizen science literature and by relying upon its contributions, this framework enables the integration of various theoretical reflections on citizen science, encompassing trade-offs among these standards and addressing ethical concerns. Furthermore, it also allows one to respond to common criticism about citizen science and to draw some important implications. In particular, we show how citizen science's fecundity is crucial for mitigating the challenges associated with unseen science, i.e., research whose results are never shared outside an institution boundary, thus highlighting its significance in the growing landscape of public participation in scientific research.
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