During the official last week of the DataONE summer internship, I have focused on making agreements on Scopus paper coding results with Yurong and developing a paper draft. With regard to the coding scheme agreements, Yurong converted our previous paper-based coding results to project-based coding results. Among the projects we identified from 56 papers on data quality mechanisms, most projects have a small number of papers written, however some other projects has more related papers than other papers do. For instance, the well-known eBird project has 6 related papers. This variation in the number of papers can cause a problem in normalization and affect the result of our meta-analysis. Therefore, Yurongโs efforts to convert the coding results from paper-basis to project-basis provided a good opportunity to look at the real terrain of the data quality mechanisms in citizen science by reducing prejudice. While making the final agreements on the coding scheme, we proposed five new mechanisms which had not been categorized in the Wiggins et alโ paper. It is critical for people to understand what each data quality mechanism means. Thus, Yurong and I agreed that we can develop some criteria such as repeatability and formality for giving aids in classifying the mechanisms.
Additionally, I worked on developing a draft of our paper. The history of citizen science is comparatively short, and many scientists are not familiar with its characteristics and do not know what kinds of quality mechanisms need to be applied. Thus, it will be critical to make customized recommendations for assuring data quality depending on the disciplines, the budget and size of the projects and the development stage of the projects. I am writing the draft in the direction that our paper can make customized recommendations.
It was a great pleasure to work for the DataONE, and I especially appreciate what I learn from my mentor, Robert Stevenson, and other members, Yurong and Todd. I hope that my short summer internship can be continued to my dissertation and future research. It was a great opportunity to understand the quality issues in citizen science. Thank you for all!!