Thompson, N., & Hanley, D. (2018). Science is shaped by wikipedia: Evidence from a randomized control trial. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3039505. 

Science is shaped by wikipedia: Evidence from a randomized control trial

- Wrote new scientific Wikipedia articles for chemistry and econometrics
- Stratified the 43 chemistry articles into 3 blocks – article author, branch of knowledge, and types of topics. Within each block, half the articles were randomly assigned as treatment and the other half as control 
- Treatment articles uploaded to Wikipedia in January 2015
- Control articles were not uploaded onto Wikipedia 
- If there is causation, then new articles added to Wikipedia should have a greater impact on the scientific community compared to new articles in the control group 

Science is shaped by wikipedia experimental design

- Studied causation of Wikipedia citations on the scientific community between 2013 and 2016
- Each of the newly written Wikipedia articles had 2 to 3 academic citations on average
- Same randomization as actual experiment for sorting articles into treatment and control groups 
- Used Poisson and Negative Binomial regressions to test whether references in Wikipedia articles affect the number of times those sources are cited in other academic publications

Science is shaped by wikipedia implicit experiment on references

Large differences between new information added to Wikipedia written about in scientific works and articles that were not added to Wikipedia imply causation - adding new citations to Wikipedia articles increases the number of times those works are cited outside of Wikipedia

University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

- "Impact of Wikipedia on citation trends"
- "Science is shaped by wikipedia: Evidence from a randomized control trial"

Studies on the causal effect of Wikipedia citations on academia citations

This study tested the hypothesis that references to an article in Wikipedia affects the article's citation trends. A measure citation "propensity" was created, which measures the likelihood of an article being cited more than what is to be expected by chance. Using statistics in the Scopus database and this measure, it was found that while the number of citations to an article does increase in number over time, citation propensity does not increase for an article after it is referenced in Wikipedia, meaning that references to an article in Wikipedia does not affect the article's citation trends. 

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