Publication records on Citizen Science and Marine Litter

Peer-reviewed articles and book chapters (which will be referred to as publication records thereon-in) related to or describing citizen science initiatives focused on marine litter were searched. The publication records were retrieved from a survey on Web of Science and ScienceDirect platforms (until 04th August, 2021). Across these 85 publication records, 48 different citizen science initiatives were reported (thus some were reported multiple times). Since some of publication records described more than one CS initiative, each initiative described for each record was analysed independently and considered as a search result, resulting in 92 search results across these 85 publication records. All authors read the same five records (representing a sample of 5.9% of the records) to discuss and review the categories and codes until there was consistency in code assignment. All the names of the categories and their definitions were defined a priori and the authors fulfilled, independently, a table coding those categories for the records of the sample. After this step, the authors shared their results and discussed the inconsistencies obtained in code assignment so that a consensus was reached and a fully shared understanding of how to categorise the search results was reached. If a new category not previously considered was identified during the reading of the full records, the authors discussed how to include it and a revision of all other records already coded was performed to look for the possible presence of this new category. As the focus of this analysis is how citizen science initiatives were being reported within the peer-reviewed scientific literature, we did not consider our previous knowledge about the initiatives and only considered information explicitly reported within or that could be obtained from the records.