can inaturalist data used for citation in research just like ebird

[image] neylon: If you read through the vast majority of papers that use iNat, it is quite common to see no iNat user as an author Have you tried roughly quantifying this? From my experience (published more than 10 iNat-related papers, reviewed ~10 iNat papers, and of course read + cited many…

Effectively like - I found it on FB and now it is mine. Or blog / photo scrapers. I wonder. As younger scientists (and journal editors) bring experience across using social media, how that will change (perhaps @beachcomber 's comment answers that for me). But with peer review and networking, scient…

Every paper I’ve read using bee data with two exceptions is as I described. There is another coming out soon that isn’t in that category. My favorite was where the authors described Research Grade as “ID’d by two experts”. So glad to see that the authors took the time to research the data before …

it must oddly be a largely bee-specific thing then

It might be. I don’t read articles that aren’t bee related. But it is something that I see quite a bit, I had an author who had an account, but wasn’t a regular user send me a few others their paper for review (thankfully) which was filled with data misunderstanding. If they had worked with one o…

Maybe part of the problem of not properly acknowledging or consulting iNat contributors is that many are anonymous behind usernames. Yes, the authors could still reach out to them by direct messaging, but if the contributor of a record can’t be readily identified as an individual with a real name, …

An online 'nym is not anonymous. People have good reasons to use 'nyms. Some scientists, who use their professional name online, have a disclaimer. ‘This is my personal opinion’. Others may need an absolute separation between work and iNat. A 'nym is not an excuse to dump ethics and courtesy.

Question: If I wanted to cite this discussion (or rather, certain replies in it) in a paper, what is the proper way to do that?

No, it’s not an excuse and, yes, there are reasons for using a pseudonym. But many usernames are anonymous … you don’t know who the person is, what their background is, where they live. I think it’s human nature to view something on the internet that is posted under the person’s real name as more …

Scientists do often use data from previous papers. In my field (ecology), many journals now require that the data underlying the paper be published in a repository (like Dryad, Figshare, etc.), and the proportion of journals that require this is increasing. That data is then free to use by other aut…

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General

Topic		Replies	Views
Authorship and iNaturalist General	32	3109	December 4, 2020
Snubbing iNat data General	85	2822	April 7, 2026
What iNaturalist is for General	50	6437	November 6, 2019
Licensing problem for paper using iNat data General question	61	2950	March 18, 2023
How to credit identifiers/observers in research papers General question	18	960	October 15, 2022

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