Despite the fact that citizen engagement in research is widely practised and regarded as one of the keys to maximizing the impact of research and innovation, empirical evidence on the value, potential and possibilities of engaging a broad diversity of citizens in practice is scant. The purpose of our article is twofold: (1) to provide more insight into the value and opportunities of engaging audiences that typically are not engaged with science and (2) to explore the effect of a targeted recruitment strategy versus a generic recruitment strategy on the profile, motivation and retainment of citizen science volunteers. Our empirical research is based on five citizen science projects in the domain of surface and drinking water research in the Netherlands.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFOver the past decades, science funding shows a shift from recurrent block funding towards project funding mechanisms. However, our knowledge of how project funding arrangements influence the organizational and epistemic properties of research is limited. To study this relation, a bridge between science policy studies and science studies is necessary.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMany science systems are witnessing the rise of intermediary organizations with a coordinating mission, but to date a systematic understanding of their function and effects is lacking. The aim of this paper is to contribute to the understanding of the coordinating efforts of intermediary organizations. Starting from the definition of coordination as , I develop a heuristic framework that facilitates the systematic analysis of coordination in science.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn many Western science systems, funding structures increasingly stimulate academic research to contribute to practical applications, but at the same time the rise of bibliometric performance assessments have strengthened the pressure on academics to conduct excellent basic research that can be published in scholarly literature. We analyze the interplay between these two developments in a set of three case studies of fields of chemistry in the Netherlands. First, we describe how the conditions under which academic chemists work have changed since 1975.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF