CITI-SCIENCE
ref : PID2022-137124OA-I00 funder : Ministry of Science and Innovation, Spain programme: Proyectos de Generación de Conocimiento period : 2023 – 2026 budget : €118,500 PI : Oscar Llopis · University of Valencia website : pages.uv.es/citiscience
Citizen science in practice: prevalence, modes and antecedents of public participation in health research.
Science is undergoing a profound transformation. Citizens and civil society organisations are increasingly contributing to the research process — not merely as subjects of study, but as active participants in the production of knowledge. This shift has been documented across disciplines, but its dynamics in healthcare remain poorly understood. CITI-SCIENCE examines this transformation in depth.
Overview
The project focuses on citizen science (CS) in health research — a broad term that captures a wide range of participatory practices in which non-professional actors contribute to the scientific process. These practices range from contributory models, where citizens perform defined tasks (e.g. data collection), to collaborative and co-created models, where citizens take part in research design, analysis, and dissemination.
Three questions organise the research:
O1. What is the prevalence and diversity of citizen science participation in health research, and how representative are the non-professional participants?
O2. What motivates biomedical scientists and citizens to participate — or not — in different forms of citizen science?
O3. How are citizen science projects designed, and how do their task, knowledge, and social characteristics interact with participation motivations?
Why This Matters
The growing interest in citizen science is not merely academic. Funders, research institutions, and public health bodies increasingly expect science to be socially relevant and participatory. Yet we lack systematic evidence on how participation actually works — how widespread it is, who joins and why, what project designs work, and what structural barriers prevent broader engagement.
CITI-SCIENCE generates this evidence, with direct implications for science policy, research management, and the design of participatory health research initiatives.
Methodology
The project uses a mixed-methods approach combining multiple data sources and analytical strategies:
- Large-scale surveys of biomedical scientists and citizen science participants in Spain, examining patterns of participation, motivations, and barriers
- Qualitative in-depth interviews with key stakeholders — scientists, patients, citizen organisations, and research funders — to understand the processes and experiences behind the numbers
- Comparative analysis of citizen science project designs, examining how tasks, knowledge demands, and social structures vary across contributory, collaborative, and co-created models
- Case studies of established initiatives in the Spanish healthcare context, tracing how projects are organised, who participates, and what they produce
Team
The project is hosted at the Departament de Direcció d’Empreses, Universitat de València, with seven researchers.
→ Full team details at pages.uv.es/citiscience