Citizen science is a term used to describe science done by interested people who may not be professional scientists.
There is a long history of citizens being involved in scientific discovery. However there is now a rapid rise in volunteers either contributing to, or running science projects.
However can the results of this research can be trusted?
A paper , by Ria Follett and Vladimir Strezov has been published in the peer review journal “PLOS One” that looks at the types of projects which have also appeared in scientific literature to understand the level of acceptance of this research. The paper “An Analysis of Citizen Science Based Research: Usage and Publication Patterns” published in 2015 can be accessed at https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0143687 .
Citizen science is live and active in Australia. See an overview of Australian Citizen Science Project