Scientific citations in Wikipedia

@article{Nielsen2007ScientificCI,
  title={Scientific citations in Wikipedia},
  author={Finn {\AA}rup Nielsen},
  journal={ArXiv},
  year={2007},
  volume={abs/0705.2106}
}
  • F. Nielsen
  • Published 15 May 2007
  • Computer Science
  • ArXiv
The Internet-based encyclopaedia Wikipedia has grown to become one of the most visited Web sites on the Internet, but critics have questioned the quality of entries. An empirical study of Wikipedia found errors in a 2005 sample of science entries. Biased coverage and lack of sources are among the "Wikipedia risks." This paper describes a simple assessment of these aspects by examining the outbound links from Wikipedia articles to articles in scientific journals with a comparison against journal… 
View PDF on arXiv
138 Citations
Highly Influential Citations
8
Background Citations
73
Methods Citations
17
Results Citations
1

Figures from this paper

138 Citations

A Map of Science in Wikipedia

It is found that most journal articles cited from Wikipedia belong to STEM fields, in particular biology and medicine, and Wikipedia’s biographies play an important role in connecting STEM fields with the humanities, especially history.

Why and where Wikipedia is cited in journal articles?

There are 20 motivations for citing Wikipedia and the most frequent of them are providing general information and definition, facts and figures, and computer sciences, internet and chemistry were the most cited subjects.

The Transmission of Scientific Knowledge to Wikipedia

It is found that, controlling for im- pact factor and open access policy, Wikipedia over-represents journals from the Social Sciences, and under-rep Representation of Journals from the Physical Sciences and Health Sciences and an open-access policy is not associated with increased Wikipedia presence.

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

The results show that citations from Wikipedia to articles are too rare for most research evaluation purposes, with only 5% of articles being cited in all fields, and so Wikipedia is not recommended for evaluations affecting stakeholder interests.

A comparative study of academic and Wikipedia ranking

The results show that academic and Wikipedia impact are positively correlated and validate the hypothesis that Wikipedia can help assess the impact of scholarly publications and underpin relevance indicators for scholarly retrieval or recommendation systems.

Quantifying Engagement with Citations on Wikipedia

This work built client-side instrumentation for logging all interactions with links leading from English Wikipedia articles to cited references during one month, and conducted the first analysis of readers’ interactions with citations, finding that overall engagement with citations is low and that references are consulted more commonly when Wikipedia itself does not contain the information sought by the user.

Analyses of Wikipedia Editors Adding Bibliographic References based on DOI Links

Concentration in the number of DOI links on English Wikipedia added by Wikipedia editors is high as a whole, and most research research values are also high in common, due to the editors who added DOI links systematically to the existing references on a large scale.

Measuring the quality of scientific references in Wikipedia: an analysis of more than 115M citations to over 800 000 scientific articles

Most scientific articles cited by Wikipedia articles are uncited or untested by subsequent studies, and the remainder show a wide variability in contradicting or supporting evidence.

Web indicators for research evaluation. Part 1: Citations and links to academic articles from the Web

Research about Google Scholar and Google Patents are reviewed, both of which can be used as sources of impact indicators for academic articles and methods to extract types of links and citations from the web as a whole are reviewed.

A Comparative Study of Academic impact and Wikipedia Ranking

In addition to its broad popularity Wikipedia is also widely used for scholarly purposes. Many Wikipedia pages pertain to academic papers, scholars and topics providing a rich ecology for scholarly…
...

16 References

Network Analysis for Wikipedia

Two relevance metrics, HITS and PageRank, are applied to the whole set of English Wikipedia entries in order to gain some preliminary insights on the macro-structure of the organization of the corpus, and on some cultural biases related to network analysis techniques.

Free online availability substantially increases a paper's impact

The impact of free online availability of an article may not greatly improve access and impact without efficient and comprehensive search services, so citation rates are analyzed by analysing citation rates.

Wikipedia risks

The Wikipedia (WP; en.wikipedia.org/wiki/) applies the wiki technology (from a Hawaiian word for “quick”) to the encyclopedia, a venerable form of knowledge organization and dissemination. Wikipedia…

Assessing the value of cooperation in Wikipedia

It is shown that the accretion of edits to an article is described by a simple stochastic mechanism, resulting in a heavy tail of highly visible articles with a large number of edits, which validates Wikipedia as a successful collaborative effort.

Puppy smoothies: Improving the reliability of open, collaborative wikis

This paper provides a practical proposal for improving user confidence in wiki information by coloring the text of a wiki article based on the venerability of the text on the philosophy that bad information is less likely to survive a collaborative editing process over large numbers of edits.

Internet encyclopaedias go head to head

Jimmy Wales' Wikipedia comes close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its science entries, a Nature investigation finds.  UPDATE: see details of how the data were collected for this article in…

A content-driven reputation system for the wikipedia

The results show that the notion of reputation has good predictive value: changes performed by low-reputation authors have a significantly larger than average probability of having poor quality, as judged by human observers, and of being later undone, as measured by the algorithms.

Computing trust from revision history

This paper explores ways of utilizing the revision history of an article to assess the trustworthiness of the article and uses this revision history-based trust model to assess a chain of successive versions of articles in Wikipedia and evaluated the assessments produced by the model.

Network Analysis of Wikipedia

The data suggest at least three stages of growth, the last of which has only recently emerged, and how growth depends upon infrastructure and internal links is considered.

Managing Information Quality in Virtual Communities of Practice

This paper examines why the rise of computermediated communication, driven by dramatically lowered cost, creates new structural problems from an information quality standpoint. We review how the new…