The DOI matches its Crossref record; 4 of the 4 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Are wikipedia citations important evidence of the impact of scholarly articles and books?
Abstract
Individual academics and research evaluators often need to assess the value of published research. Although citation counts are a recognized indicator of scholarly impact, alternative data is needed to provide evidence of other types of impact, including within education and wider society. Wikipedia is a logical choice for both of these because the role of a general encyclopaedia is to be an understandable repository of facts about a diverse array of topics and hence it may cite research to support its claims. To test whether Wikipedia could provide new evidence about the impact of scholarly research, this article counted citations to 302,328 articles and 18,735 monographs in English indexed by Scopus in the period 2005 to 2012. 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. In contrast, a third of monographs have at least one citation from Wikipedia, with the most in the arts and humanities. Hence, Wikipedia citations can provide extra impact evidence for academic monographs. Nevertheless, the results may be relatively easily manipulated and so Wikipedia is not recommended for evaluations affecting stakeholder interests.
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“Hence, little is known of the editors and their contributions to the addition of scholarly references to Wikipedia.”
From Dataset of first appearances of the scholarly bibliographic references on Wikipedia articles (2022) · cites this paper as [5]
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In the citing paper
“Several studies have been conducted regarding scholarly bibliographic references on Wikipedia; however, most of them have focused on the scholarly document itself2–6.”
From Dataset of first appearances of the scholarly bibliographic references on Wikipedia articles (2022) · cites this paper as [5]
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In the citing paper
“The methodologies in previous studies used to identify the scholarly references on Wikipedia can be classified as follows: (1) extracting them from either page texts (Wikitexts) or Wikipedia external links2–4, (2) detecting the pages contain them by using web search engines5, and (3) analyzing usage log data6.”
From Dataset of first appearances of the scholarly bibliographic references on Wikipedia articles (2022) · cites this paper as [5]
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Internet encyclopaedias go head to head
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Junior physician's use of Web 2.0 for information seeking and medical education: a qualitative study
Hughes, B., Joshi, I., Lemonde, H., & Wareham, J. (2009) · International Journal of Medical Informatics · doi:10.1016/j.ijmedinf.2009.04.008 · Cited by 217
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Cited by
Sorted by citations
How Frequently Are Articles in Predatory Open Access Journals Cited
Björk, B.-C., Kanto-Karvonen, S., & Harviainen, J. T. (2020) · Publications · doi:10.3390/publications8020017 · Cited by 77
Dataset of first appearances of the scholarly bibliographic references on Wikipedia articles
Kikkawa, J., Takaku, M., & Yoshikane, F. (2022) · Scientific Data · doi:10.1038/s41597-022-01190-z · Cited by 4
Kikkawa, J., Takaku, M., & Yoshikane, F. (2023) · Lecture Notes in Computer Science · doi:10.1007/978-3-031-28032-0_33
Metadata
- Authors
- Kousha, K., & Thelwall, M.
- Venue
- Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Published
- 2016-06-13
- Volume
- 68
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 762-779
- ISSN
- 2330-1635
- 2330-1643
- Cited by
- 67
- References
- 4
- Language
- en
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
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