Nielsen, F. Å. (2007). Scientific citations in Wikipedia. arXiv preprint arXiv:0705.2106. https://arxiv.org/abs/0705.2106 

University of California, Berkeley

University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

This paper worked to answer the question "How well do the outgoing scientific citations in Wikipedia compare with the citations seen between scientific journals?" A correlation was found between the number of Wikipedia references to a top journal and the total number of citations to that journal as well as the journal's impact factor. This looked at the 160 most cited journals from Wikipedia, and used statistics from the Journal Citations Report (JCR). 

Scientific citations in Wikipedia

Researchers extracted the names of journals from the "cite journal" template, a method of referencing on Wikipedia, in all the pages of English Wikipedia. The number of citations to each journal was then counted. For their analysis, they used their datadump from April 2, 2007. For information about citations between scientific journals, they used statistics from the "Journal Citation Reports" (JCR) for 2005 of "Thomson Scientific." They then compared their numbers from their datadump to different values found on JCR including the total number of citations to a journal, a journal's impact factor, the number of articles in a journal, and the product of total number of citations and the impact factor. 

Scientific citations in Wikipedia Methodology 

A high correlation was found between Wikipedia citation count and the total number of citations to a journal. There was less of a correlation between the Wikipedia citation count and the impact factor and the Wikipedia citation count and the number of articles in the journal. However, the highest correlation they found was between the Wikipedia citation count and the product of the journal citation count and the journal's impact factor. They found the greatest correlation for journals that were highly cited. They also noted that the correlation depended on the number of journals in the test, with greater correlation when more journals are included. 

Learn Before

Related