Source-linked AI summary
Scientific citations in Wikipedia
Finn Aarup Nielsen
TL;DR
The study asks whether Wikipedia’s outbound scientific references can help assess concerns about sourcing and coverage. It extracts structured journal citations and compares them with JCR statistics, finding the strongest agreement with journal citation totals.
Problem
It is unclear how prolific Wikipedia’s outbound citations to scientific work are or how they are distributed across fields, amid concerns about source gaps and coverage bias.
Source: p. 1Method
The authors extracted journal titles from cite journal templates across the English Wikipedia database dump and compared citation counts with 2005 JCR statistics.
Source: p. 2Results
Wikipedia journal counts correlated more with JCR citation totals than with impact factors or article counts, especially among highly cited journals; astronomy journals stood out.
Source: p. 4Takeaways & Limitations
Structured scientific citations can provide researchers with well-organized pointers to original research.
Source: p. 4Structured citations were few relative to scientific-literature citations, so a few enthusiasts could influence the counts with relatively few edits.
Source: p. 4
Abstract
from arXiv · showhide
The Internet-based encyclopaedia Wikipedia has grown to become one of the most visited web-sites on the Internet. However, critics have questioned the quality of entries, and an empirical study has shown Wikipedia to contain errors in a 2005 sample of science entries. Biased coverage and lack of sources are among the "Wikipedia risks". The present work 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 statistics from Journal Citation Reports such as impact factors. The results show an increasing use of structured citation markup and good agreement with the citation pattern seen in the scientific literature though with a slight tendency to cite articles in high-impact journals such as Nature and Science. These results increase confidence in Wikipedia as an good information organizer for science in general.