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Citizen Science in Health Domain

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Synonyms

Open science

What Is Citizen Science?

Democraticization and Openness

In recent years, we have been witnessing increasing evidence that the separation between roles traditionally associated with knowledge production, on the one hand, and roles associated with utilizing and “consuming” knowledge, on the other, have become blurry (see Gibbons et al. 1994; Nowotny et al. 2001). While this is true in many fields of science (Goodchild 2007; Fischer et al. 2012; Nielsen 2011), the health domain is a particularly illustrative example. Patients have started to organize their own medical studies and trials (Wicks et al. 2011); questions that professional scientists have been struggling for years, or even decades, are solved by people playing computer games (e.g., Khatib et al. 2011), and patients facing difficult treatment decisions put their medical information online to invite experts from all over the world to comment (e.g., Albanello 2011). The notion of “crowdsourcing” has been...

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Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank David Campbell, Jason Hughes, John Roberts, Hendrik Wagenaar, and the participants of the European Science Foundation (ESF) meeting on personalized medicine in Dubrovnik on 13–14 February 2012 for constructive comments and helpful discussions that informed this entry.

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Correspondence to Barbara Prainsack Phil FRSA .

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Prainsack, B. (2013). Citizen Science in Health Domain. In: Carayannis, E.G. (eds) Encyclopedia of Creativity, Invention, Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-3858-8_257

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-3858-8_257

  • Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY

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