Citizen science, essentially the use of members of the pubic to collect data for synthesis, analysis, and publication, is increasingly being employed in the life sciences in fields as diverse as ecology, behavior, taxonomy, and paleontology. A major factor in its rise is the enhanced connectivity and functionality offered by recent internet advances, especially social media. A “citizen science” approach has advantages beyond the collection of data, with some programmes having primary or secondary goals related to education, outreach, and participation. However, despite clear advantages, citizen science approaches have numerous potentially fatal drawbacks related to, amongst other things, the reliability of data (especially when members of the public identify species themselves) and the statistical issues that can arise from analysis of presence-only data (i.e., because species absences are not usually recorded except in full scientific surveys).

As the field advances it is necessary to evaluate the role and potential of citizen science and volunteer-based projects for the collection of publishable data. With many different groups taking on citizen science projects with a varying level of success, many lessons are being learned locally, but the difficulty of publishing negative results, or studies that are more informative about the approach than the results, means that such lessons are not being shared. For this special issue we are seeking papers that critically explore the role of citizen science in zoological research. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Successful citizen science or volunteer-based projects with scientifically significant results
• Citizen science or volunteer-based projects that were successful with respect to the “citizen” element but did not generate statistically significant results
• Projects where issues of data analysis have not been adequately addressed, as long as reasons for this are acknowledged and discussed
• Studies where the impact of citizen science or volunteer-based data collection has exceeded that of traditional academic approaches
• Successful volunteer training programmes that have enhanced the ability of volunteers to collect data
• Citizen science and volunteer-based approaches for data collection that were unsuccessful and the reasons for that lack of success
• Statistical or technological methods for recruitment of citizen or volunteer scientists or analysis of resultant data
• Collation and/or analysis of citizen science data
• Taxonomic, geographical, or approach-based reviews of citizen science projects
• Web-based recruitment and data collection

Before submission authors should carefully read over the journal's Author Guidelines, which are located at http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijz/guidelines/. Prospective authors should submit an electronic copy of their complete manuscript through the journal Manuscript Tracking System at http://mts.hindawi.com/ according to the following timetable: