Science through Wikipedia: A novel representation of open knowledge through co-citation networks

Abstract

This study provides an overview of science from the Wikipedia perspective. A methodology has been established for the analysis of how Wikipedia editors regard science through their references to scientific papers. The method of co-citation has been adapted to this context in order to generate Pathfinder networks (PFNET) that highlight the most relevant scientific journals and categories, and their interactions in order to find out how scientific literature is consumed through this open encyclopaedia. In addition to this, their obsolescence has been studied through Price index. A total of 1 433 457 references available at Altmetric.com have been initially taken into account. After pre-processing and linking them to the data from Elsevier's CiteScore Metrics the sample was reduced to 847 512 references made by 193 802 Wikipedia articles to 598 746 scientific articles belonging to 14 149 journals indexed in Scopus. As highlighted results we found a significative presence of "Medicine" and "Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology" papers and that the most important journals are multidisciplinary in nature, suggesting also that high-impact factor journals were more likely to be cited. Furthermore, only 13.44% of Wikipedia citations are to Open Access journals.

COVID-19 research in Wikipedia

“…Altmetric provides Wikipedia citation data relying on known identifiers. 6 Despite this limitation, Altmetric data have been previously used to map Wikipedia’s use of scientific articles [65, 60, 6], especially since citations from Wikipedia are considered a possible measure of impact [54, 26]. Publications from the full list above are queried using the Altmetric API by DOI or PMID.…”

“…Following Wikipedia’s editorial guidelines, the community of editors creates contents often relying on scientific and scholarly literature [40, 19, 6], and therefore Wikipedia can be considered a mainstream gateway to scientific information [30, 20, 32, 50, 34, 44]. Unfortunately, few studies have considered the representativeness and reliability of Wikipedia’s scientific sources.…”

“…Early studies point to a relative low overall coverage, indicating that between 1% and 5% of all published journal articles are cited in Wikipedia [47, 51, 65]. Previous studies have shown that the subset of scientific literature cited from Wikipedia is more likely on average to be published on popular, high-impact-factor journals, and to be available in open access [39, 57, 6].…”

“…Articles part of the WikiProject Medicine “are longer, possess a greater density of external links, and are visited more often than other articles on Wikipedia” [33]. Perhaps not surprisingly, the fields of research that receive most citations from Wikipedia are “Medicine (32.58%)” and “Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology (31.5%)” [6]; Wikipedia medical pages also contain more citations to scientific literature than the average Wikipedia page [34]. Margins for improvement remain, as for example the readability of medical content in Wikipedia remains difficult for the non-expert [9].…”

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

“…As of 2018, there were 841,821 scientific articles in Wikipedia referenced across 1,923,575 Wikipedia articles, meaning 32% ( 1,923,575 /6,006,758) of all Wikipedia articles reference a scientific article. The accuracy of these articles is paramount, especially considering that Wikipedia is often the first and only source of information for some readers.…”