Measuring epistemic success of a biodiversity citizen science program: A citation study

publications issued from citizen science projects in astronomy. The author shows that the aggregated citation rate of 143 published papers resulting from 23 citizen science projects is very high 3 years after publication (about 4 times the average of a sample of classical papers). This short-term peak is followed by a sharp decline: after 8 years, citizen science articles from his sample are significantly less cited than mainstream ones. However, our results are fare for being directly comparable to [15]’s ones, since the projects’ structures and scientific domain are very different. At this stage, a central issue is that of the generality of the conclusions we can draw from our results for citizen science practices. Vigie-Nature is indeed a very specific program, charac- terized by its large scale (the whole French territory) and its longevity (more than thirty years). In addition, the produced data are massively diffused through peer-reviewed scientific articles, which is rarely the case for biodiversity citizen science projects: [34] have shown that only 12% of the 388 projects they surveyed reach scientific literature. In addition, they suggest that the public availability of the data, the control of scientific rigor, and the projects’ spatial scale and longevity positively influence publication. Similarly, [35] have shown that the accessibility of the data, and the presence of coordinators aiming to maintain data quality enhance the scien- tific impact of biodiversity citizen science projects. Furthermore, projects dedicated to long-

term monitoring also seem to have a greater impact. Together with these studies, our results might allow to formulate some hypothesis about the conditions which promote the epistemic Table 2. Citation thresholds for the 10%, 20% and 50% most cited papers, for Vigie-Nature and the whole Envi- ronment and Ecology field, between 2009 and 2019. 10% 20% 50% Environment/Ecology 33 19 6 Vigie-Nature 76 50 21 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0258350.t002 Fig 4. Time-dependent median value of the Vigie-Nature articles citation rate. The median (in blue) is compared to the average citation rate of the articles in biodiversity and conservation from WoS (in red, sample size: 60847 papers). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0258350.g004 PLOS ONE A citation study of a biodiversity citizen science program PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0258350 October 11, 2021 9 / 13