1.2. Various ways to integrate citizens into Citizen Science

1.2.A. Different aims of CS

Citizen Science (CS) allows for integrating non-scientists people, also named as “the general public” (Buyaert et al., 2014), in research processes as “active participants” (Sauermann et al., 2020). CS may change both scientists and participants and its usually expected outcomes cover three main premises (Strasser et al. 2018):

Therefore, on the basis of the pursued objectives and of the shape they take, CS approaches have been classified into three main forms. Among the different typologies found in the literature, one may refer for instance to Kasperwoski et al. (2017), who defined three types of CS:

On a more practical perspective, one may actually identify different levels of integration of the general public into the practice of science. And thus, one may refer to different methods according to their objective. For instance, the approach will be different if one seek to complete a dataset by inviting people to perform an inventory of some organisms in a given area or to empower a local population to deal with a particular issue within this area. It is therefore particularly important to clearly define the objective of any research project before adopting a CS approach. This is necessary to ensure that the methods used later are relevant and performant enough to fulfill the stated aims. Users of CS may refer to some typologies to identify more easily which kind of approach may suit the best to their objectives.