Citizen Science and Artificial Intelligence in Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe Projects: Communication and Scientific Impact

Abstract

The Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe framework programs are the key funding programs for the European Union's policy on innovation, research, and development (R&D&I) in all scientific subject areas. These instruments promote open science by using citizen science as a collaborative methodology and artificial intelligence as a disruptive technology, thereby encouraging public participation and engagement in scientific research. This paradigm shift in the scientific landscape is the impetus for this descriptive and exploratory study analyzing the effectiveness of communication policies and the quality of the dissemination and scientific impact of 28 R&D&I projects developed using citizen science and artificial intelligence, which were selected from the Community Research and Development Information Service (CORDIS) repository. This case study employs a methodological procedure grounded in content analysis and bibliometric indicators to meet four specific objectives: to determine the main formats and channels used in the projects’ communication strategies, as well as which category the projects’ papers fall into; to analyze the effectiveness of the projects’ scientific dissemination using articles published in Scopus according to subject area; to analyze the quality of scientific impact of the 234 articles that the projects produced using the SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) indicator; and to evaluate their specific and comparative impact using the standardized indicators Field-weighted citation impact (FWCI) and CiteScore. The findings confirmed that there were substantial differences in terms of the effectiveness of communication and the quality of dissemination and scientific impact among the projects analyzed. In this context, communication science could help efficiently navigate the challenges and opportunities in scientific communication.