Scoping Review of Technology Use in Animal-Related Citizen Science Projects

A scoping review of 153 studies examines the challenges and opportunities of digital technology use for coordinators of animal-related citizen science projects. The review, conducted by Sangita Ganesh and following the PRISMA framework, analyzed studies from Web of Science, Proquest, and Scopus. It was last updated on 2026-05-21 and is shared under a CC-BY-4.0 license.

Use Cases

• Identify common technology adoption patterns based on the reported prevalence of social media, mobile apps, and web platforms.
• Analyze reported challenges to project design based on themes like accessibility, data quality, and conflicting goals.
• Investigate geographic and community engagement gaps based on the noted under-representation of Global South contexts.
• Benchmark coordinator decision-making processes based on the described top-down implementation trends.

Strengths

• Analysis is based on a defined corpus of 153 included studies.
• The review identifies a primary technology used, with social media reported in 52% of studies (n=80).
• Methodology is explicitly described as following the PRISMA framework for scoping reviews.

Limitations

• The dataset is a 78.5 KB PDF document, which is a very small text summary rather than the underlying extracted data.
• Row count and column-level documentation for the extracted study data are unknown.
• The actual data tables from the review are not provided, limiting direct analysis.

Provenance

Source

figshare, author Sangita Ganesh.

Collection Method

Scoping review following PRISMA, with searches across Web of Science, Proquest, and Scopus.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-05-21 05:42:40; freshness should be verified.