RESUMEN
A citation study of a sample of earth science projects in citizen science from the FedCats Catalog was undertaken to assess whether citizen science projects are as productive and as impactful as conventional research that does not employ volunteer participation as a part of their data gathering and analysis protocols. From the 783 peer-reviewed papers produced by 48 projects identified from project bibliographies, 12,380 citations were identified using the Web of Science archive and their citation search engine to the end of 2018. Various conventional productivity and impact measures were applied including the Impact Factor, H and M-indices, and entry into the Top-1000 papers in cited research. The earth science projects tend to under-perform in terms of Impact Factor (IF = 14-20) and the M-index (M<0.5) but perform at the level of a 'tenured professor' with