Spearman correlations indicate monotonic relationships between two variables. A positive Spearman correlation coefficient implies an increasing monotonic trend and a negative Spearman correlation coefficient implies a decreasing monotonic trend between the two variables. For more information see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spearman%27s_rank_correlation_coefficient#Interpretation. 

Spearman Correlations

1. Low but significant Spearman correlations between Scopus citations and Wikipedia citations to articles in different disciplines in different years. Since most of the Spearman correlation coefficients listed here are greater than 0, there appears to be an increasing trend between Wikipedia and Scopus citations. 

University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

Collected large samples of recent academic journal articles and publications from a variety of disciplines - a total of 302,328 article citations and 18,735 monographs from 2005 to 2012 from Scopus. Of all these articles, only 5% included references to Wikipedia, but 33% of the monographs, mostly in arts and humanities, contained as least one citation to Wikipedia. 

Are Wikipedia citations important evidence of the impact of scholarly articles and books? data collection

Kousha, K., & Thelwall, M. (2017). Are Wikipedia citations important evidence of the impact of scholarly articles and books?. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 68(3), 762-779. https://asistdl.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/asi.23694. 

"Are Wikipedia citations important evidence of the impact of scholarly articles and books?"

1. Wikipedia citations were more commonly found in book-based fields, and Wikipedia is more likely to cite older books than newer books and articles. 

2. There is a higher percentage of articles with Wikipedia citations in arts and humanities and social sciences than in science and technology (as seen in the table below)

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