A systematic review of the current theory base in the crowdsourcing literature

Abstract

Crowdsourcing literature has been grown up to an important field of research in recent years. Many studies in different areas have paid attention to the field and various theories have been utilised in these studies. The aim of the current study is developing a big picture of the theories which have been used in this area. By reviewing 887 papers in most important scientific databases, we identified 9 theory development and 50 theory based studies in the literature and categorised them based on the focus of the study (motivation, evaluation, organization, technology, and application) and the discipline from which the used theory came from (psychology, information systems, organization studies, sociology, economics, decision science, engineering, and journalism).