Citizen Science Design in Practice: A Taxonomic Study of Configurations, Clusters, and Disciplinary Influences in German Initiatives

Citizen science encompasses a wide spectrum of practices that differ not only in the degree of participant involvement but also in key design decisions shaping collaboration, communication, and incentives. While prior research has offered influential typologies based on participation levels, comparatively little empirical work has examined the broader configuration of design dimensions. This study addresses this gap by applying a comprehensive taxonomy for participatory processes to survey data from 60 projects listed on Germany’s national citizen science platform. The analysis focuses on top-down design decisions made by project initiators and combines descriptive analysis with cluster analysis. The results identify two loosely separated design configurations that organize projects into broader patterns rather than strict categories, aligning with crowdsourcing-oriented and participatory research–oriented models. The analysis further reveals systematic associations between these configurations and the projects’ disciplinary orientations. Although the empirical basis is grounded in the German citizen science ecosystem, the conceptual framework and findings contribute to a broader understanding of design heterogeneity in citizen science and provide a basis for more systematic comparison of project architectures.