New study of birds shows citizen science can be trusted

Citizen science, also known as science, has no incentive to falsify results to advance their career since they're already happily employed in an unrelated field.

I’ve been working on a citizen science project recently. I realized I don’t really care if no one uses or trusts the data. I want to do it, I want to learn, and I think the outcome will be useful at the very least to increase awareness. Maybe that’s good enough?<p>I think academia is walled off in part for good reason, but I have a feeling more people should participate in citizen science projects too. Even if you aren’t doing anything ground breaking, you still might be inching things in the right direction. It’s a great way to care about things, teach your kids, explore new skills and techniques with equipment, etc. I wish I started sooner.

My wife is prof at a decent uni in the states teaching big stuff™ and I got into a conversation about this with her recently, where we landed was &quot;will academia ever trust plebs like me?&quot; and after an hr or so of back and forth it was evident to me on average: it will not. I&#x27;m still thinking about what I think about that, but it was certainly my resolve, at least within my wifes institution (will remain unnamed).

I use iNaturalist to log my observations and I think one benefit of such platforms is the large number of eyeballs available: casual observers see things not captured in more formal scientific field work.<p>This happened to me: I saw an unusual bee while walking in a nature reserve. I posted it on iNaturalist and it got identified as a seldom seen bee. A bee researcher contacted me to get the location for a field study, resulting in a paper that documented the bee&#x27;s natural behaviour.<p>Other iNat observers have spotted moths and insects that haven&#x27;t been seen for decades, for example. In this way, citizen scientist are helping scientist to find out more about nature.

Didn&#x27;t the majority of science used to be done by &quot;citizen&quot; scientists?

If professional science has gotten to be more about trust than reproducibility, then professional science cannot be trusted.

Well, define &quot;trust&quot;.<p>This example is using what sounds like crowdsource apps as a measurement instrument. Which is going to have different limitations and different sources of interference than other measurement instruments, but <i>of course</i> it can work if what you&#x27;re using it for is able to handle this.

For certain values of &quot;citizen science&quot;. When you get to the perpetual motion proponents and the anti-vaxxers, that might be a problem there.

This entire thread is replies is extremely disappointing. Obviously there are issues with credentialism but the widespread cynicism and rejection of the scientific enterprise throws the baby out with the bathwater. The scientific method itself is about continuously identifying what’s wrong and iteratively improving our knowledge. That inherently involves making some wrong turns and mistakes and spending money on some things that don’t pan out, but I’m surprised to see so many voices here arguing for less science.