Unless you’re stuck in an airport like Tom Hanks in that movie, you’re a citizen of somewhere. So pointing out that someone is a citizen is kind of a non-starter. Yes, they are also made of molecules, they are a mammal, what of it? 

But for some reason, we keep finding ourselves in conversations where people pull out the term “citizen science”. What is that adjective doing there, Timmy? What is it doing? 

In most cases, adjectives are looped in on a noun to add some information. A car may be red, but we call it a red car when we want to distinguish it from other cars. A red car is not green, blue, white, etc. What information does “citizen” add, what other scientists are we distinguishing them from? If “blue” is a non-red car, what is a non-citizen scientist? 

We’re tired of having conversations about “citizen science”. First of all, “citizen science” is incoherent. Pointing out that science was done by “a citizen” is like pointing out that it was done by someone with a nose; except more vapid than that, since some scientists don’t have noses, while almost all scientists have citizenship. Tenured professors at Princeton and Oxford are citizens; so are research professionals at Pfizer and ThermoFisher. So why point out that a particular project involved citizens? 

Because the term is so incoherent, the only reason to use it is to be condescending. The implication is that the citizens involved are not scientists, and that “citizen science” is a process of the general public (after all, almost everyone qualifies as a citizen, so this is the lowest possible bar) helping “real” scientists with their work.

This is not even a very subtle condescension — when people go on to define citizen science, they usually say it outright. Wikipedia describes “citizen science” as “research conducted with the participation of the general public”, and other definitions are even more blunt: “the practice of public participation and collaboration in scientific research, where everyday people help professional scientists gather, analyze, or report data.”

But we already have a term for people who do research: we call them scientists, and William Whewell didn’t coin the term “scientist” to describe local mom Mary Somerville in his anonymous 1834 review of her On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences for us to abuse it with vapid adjectives like “citizen”. Mary Somerville was a translator, experimentalist, astronomer, and mathematician. She was also a citizen of Great Britain, but you would never think to call her a “citizen scientist”, it would be an insult to a great woman. She was a scientist. 

Amateur Hour in the House of Science

If we insist on making a distinction, we should be clear about it. How about professional science vs. amateur science?

While “amateur” has become a bit of an insult, it originally referred to someone who loved what they did. It comes from French amateur, via Latin amātor (“lover”), from amāre (“to love”). An amateur is someone who’s in it for the love of the game — in contrast to a professional, who does it for pay. 

Historically, most scientists were amateurs, in the sense that they were not paid to do science. They mostly had day jobs or were independently wealthy. Charles Darwin? Independently wealthy. Gregor Mendel? Day job. Robert Boyle? Fabulously wealthy. Albert Einstein? Famously, day job as a patent clerk. Caroline Herschel was granted an annual salary of £50 by King George III for her work as her brother William’s assistant, but this was the exception, rather than the rule. 

Because they are paid to do science, and often paid, implicitly or explicitly, to get certain kinds of results, pros have the most incentive to manipulate their data, the most incentive to outright lie. Professional research is always at least a little suspect. Amateurs didn’t give us the replication crisis. Pros did.  

That said, we do support scientists getting paid for their work. We think amateur scientists are real scientists, as real or sometimes more real than the professionals, but we don’t think that all scientists should remain amateurs. It’s natural for the very talented to go pro, we want that.

So if “amateur” rubs you the wrong way, maybe academic science vs. indie science.

Keep Science Indie

We love the term “indie science”, and not just because of the implied street cred. If indie music is “a broad style of music characterized by creative freedom, low budgets, and a do-it-yourself approach to music creation”, that’s a phenomenal target to aim at for science. 

The only thing that captures our ideal ethos better is the slogan, “Tony Stark did this in a cave with a box of scraps”. Galileo, Newton, and Einstein revolutionized physics, and the biggest line item on their budgets was for thought experiments. Big telescopes are great, but science doesn’t benefit from having a particle accelerator fetish. We like Paramore, but we also like mewithoutYou.

(While we’re on music genre metaphors, is it too much to ask for punk rock science? Blunt and confrontational, fun and liveliness, designed to outrage and shock the mainstream? Honestly, that might be a return to tradition. In The Scientific Virtues, we named Rebellion as one of the seven virtues, because thumbing your nose at common sense and conventional wisdom is not optional.)

Indies are independent. Independence of thought, judgment, and outcome. The opposite of “indie music” is “selling out to the man”. You cannot serve both God and Elsevier.

Calling things “citizen science” has a chilling effect on broad and general participation in the scientific enterprise, which is the common heritage of humanity. Discouraging that is contemptible — which is why we hate to hear it! 

If you have noticed something strange or wonderful or mysterious in the world around you and you want to understand it better, you should go for it. Discoveries made by people without PhDs, or people without jobs for that matter, are still discoveries. Anyone with a good idea should do it — even if they happen to have citizenship.