Abstract:     The reasonable value orientation of scientific research projects is valuable for promoting public participation, strengthening scientific output, enhancing civic literacy, and improving research investment performance. The text descriptions of research value of citizen science projects were classified into problem-oriented, cognition-oriented and goal-oriented ones based on the grounded theory. A text mining method was used to classify value orientation of the research value description texts of citizen science projects based on the expanded keyword list. Using 1,456 citizen science projects from the Experiment platform as the research corpus, two econometric models with financing amount and number of participants as dependent variables were constructed to explore the impact of value orientation on public willingness to participate, and to compare the effects of initiator′s identities, disciplinary categories and financing goals on value orientation. The findings showed that about 46% of public science projects are goal-oriented while about 30% are cognition-oriented and the rest are problem-oriented. The willingness of the public to participate in projects using the cognition-oriented is significantly higher than the other two types of value orientation, indicating that citizen science should be committed to popularizing public scientific knowledge. Meanwhile, this paper found that university professors tend to favor the problem-oriented; graduate students use the goal-oriented more; and amateur researchers are accustomed to using the cognition-oriented. Among these three types of social roles, there is consistency in the impact of value orientation: the cognition-oriented has the greatest impact and is significantly better than the other two types of value orientation. An analysis of the differences between projects in the natural science and projects in the humanities and social science found that the advantage of the cognition-oriented comes mainly from projects in the natural science. Robustness test of the financing goals found that the financing goal has a positive moderating effect on all three types of value orientation, but the cognition-oriented is least affected by the financing goals while the problem-oriented is most affected by the financing goals. The paper will enrich the understanding of the value orientation of scientific research projects by exploring the impact of value orientation on the willingness of participation, bridge the gap of value orientation in persuasive theoretical researches, and provide practical inspiration for initiators of citizen science projects to write attractive project descriptions, managers to improve the performance of their platforms, and science popularization institutions to enhance civic literacy. 

Key words: citizen science, value orientation, text description, text mining, participation willingness