Citizen science involves collaboration between scientists and volunteers to gather field and observational data [ 34], and several studies have found that these types of collaborations produce reliable data that would be difficult to gather by any individual research group or scientist [ 35, 36].
In the early days most Open Access journals were small-scale individual operations run by groups or individual scientists, much in the same spirit as Open Source Software projects [4].
When scrutiny and criticism of professional actions arose, it came from within science and medicine: from the student doctors who ran regional Medical Groups, or leftist scientists in the British Society for Social Responsibility in Science (Whong-Barr, 2003; Werskey, 2007).
These are stories featuring highly skilled individuals or groups (often scientists) who navigate or pacify hostile environments through their wits and talents.
Big Science is characterized by large-scale instruments and facilities, supported by funding from government or international agencies, in which research is conducted by teams or groups of scientists and technicians.
The key in this instance is that the voting takes place only after an extended period of Q&A back and forth between schoolchildren around the country and small groups of scientists or engineers.
Here, I propose simple indices that measure the networking intensity, the effective size of a network, for scientists or groups of scientists who co-author papers.
The MEDLINE categorization algorithm may have several uses in bibliometrics: To categorize the scientific production of one scientist (or a group of scientists or an entire laboratory): for example, to check if its main fields of research are correlated with the top-rated metaterms generated by the algorithm.
Moreover, there are real limitations to what individual scientists or even groups of scientists can do on their own, as this recent H5N1 case illustrates vividly.
students need to be made aware that the scientific community, not public opinion polls, individual scientists, or small groups of scientists decide what is good science (Clough, p. 74).
