Galaxy Zoo: Motivations of Citizen Scientists
  Citizen science, in which volunteers work with professional scientists to
conduct research, is expanding due to large online datasets. To plan projects,
it is important to understand volunteers' motivations for participating. This
paper analyzes results from an online survey of nearly 11,000 volunteers in
Galaxy Zoo, an astronomy citizen science project. Results show that volunteers'
primary motivation is a desire to contribute to scientific research. We
encourage other citizen science projects to study the motivations of their
volunteers, to see whether and how these results may be generalized to inform
the field of citizen science.
