Standards are useful in the development of medicine because they enable communication and consistency in experimentation. Standards, however, often require expensive tools like laboratories and clinical trials. How, then, might citizen scientists develop standards given the difficulty of obtaining these tools? This article provides one answer, by describing how Clusterbusters, a non-profit...
Researchers across academia, government, and private industry increasingly value patient-led research for its ability to produce quick results from large samples of the population. This study examines the role played by self-experimentation in the production of health data collected in these projects. We ask: How does the collaborative context of online health communities, with their ability to...