TY - JOUR
T1 - Measuring epistemic success of a biodiversity citizen science program
T2 - a citation study
AU - Bedessem, Baptiste
AU - Julliard, Romain
AU - Montuschi, Eleonora
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 Bedessem et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
PY - 2021/10
Y1 - 2021/10
N2 - This paper offers a comparative evaluation of the scientific impact of a citizen science program in ecology, ‘‘Vigie-Nature”, managed by the French National Museum of Natural History. Vigie-Nature consists of a national network of amateur observatories dedicated to a participative study of biodiversity in France that has been running for the last twenty years. We collected 123 articles published by Vigie-Nature in international peer-reviewed journals between 2007 and 2019, and computed the yearly amount of citations of these articles between 0–12 years post-publication. We then compared this body of citations with the number of yearly citations relative to the ensemble of the articles published in ecology and indexed in the ‘‘Web of Science” data-base. Using a longitudinal data analysis, we could observe that the yearly number of citations of the Vigie-Nature articles is significantly higher than that of the other publications in the same domain. Furthermore, this excess of citations tends to steadily grow over time: Vigie-Nature publications are about 1.5 times more cited 3 years after publication, and 3 times more cited 11 years post-publication. These results suggest that large-scale biodiversity citizen science projects are susceptible to reach a high epistemic impact, when managed in specific ways which need to be clarified through further investigations.
AB - This paper offers a comparative evaluation of the scientific impact of a citizen science program in ecology, ‘‘Vigie-Nature”, managed by the French National Museum of Natural History. Vigie-Nature consists of a national network of amateur observatories dedicated to a participative study of biodiversity in France that has been running for the last twenty years. We collected 123 articles published by Vigie-Nature in international peer-reviewed journals between 2007 and 2019, and computed the yearly amount of citations of these articles between 0–12 years post-publication. We then compared this body of citations with the number of yearly citations relative to the ensemble of the articles published in ecology and indexed in the ‘‘Web of Science” data-base. Using a longitudinal data analysis, we could observe that the yearly number of citations of the Vigie-Nature articles is significantly higher than that of the other publications in the same domain. Furthermore, this excess of citations tends to steadily grow over time: Vigie-Nature publications are about 1.5 times more cited 3 years after publication, and 3 times more cited 11 years post-publication. These results suggest that large-scale biodiversity citizen science projects are susceptible to reach a high epistemic impact, when managed in specific ways which need to be clarified through further investigations.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85117144875&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1371/journal.pone.0258350
DO - 10.1371/journal.pone.0258350
M3 - Article
SN - 1932-6203
VL - 16
JO - PLoS ONE
JF - PLoS ONE
IS - 10 October
M1 - e0258350
ER -