Engagement and Communication Features of Scientifically Successful Citizen Science Projects

The rise of citizen science in the past decade has brought many opportunities for scientists and publics alongside many challenges and questions regarding best practices. These include questions regarding public engagement, project design and measures of success. The aim of this study is to better understand what makes citizen science projects scientifically successful, and highlight what can be learned and implemented in future project design. We focus on scientifically productive projects as a success measure that can encourage greater scientists’ involvement in citizen science, and analyze five of these projects for factors that contribute to their success. We found that although all projects have strong scientific goals, they all have additional strong emphases on communication and social practices, providing a good user experience and generating motivation and empowerment. We provide five heuristics for the future design of citizen science projects, which focus on engagement and communication features which we believe are important for citizen science project success.