- Scientific articles that were cited in the newly written Wikipedia articles in the treatment group saw a e$^{0.6490}$ - 1 = 91% increase compared to references listed in the control group articles
- Exposure through publishing new articles onto Wikipedia also increased citations by 2$^{0.1762}$ – 1 = 13%. 
- Scholars are more likely to first consult Wikipedia and references listed in specific articles before conducting additional research and publishing their own findings in academic journals (more article views mean those references are cited more frequently outside of Wikipedia)

Science is shaped by wikipedia reference causation

- 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

University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

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

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

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. 

- 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 

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