- Edit history of every Wikipedia article from the very beginning for 5.1 million articles, 353 million edits, and 17.4 billion words
- Full-text versions of 50 scientific journals, or 745,000 articles on chemistry, from Elsevier all published after 2000 and 27,000 Wikipedia articles about chemistry-related subjects

Science is shaped by wikipedia observational study data collection

Correlation between Wikipedia articles and research contributions in science, specifically chemistry in this study, shows that Wikipedia is most commonly used as a reference tool

University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

Numerous empirical studies have consistently demonstrated a positive correlation between the citation of research on Wikipedia and its academic impact. These findings indicate that journals with higher impact factors and academic rankings are more frequently cited on Wikipedia. Conversely, papers and authors referenced on Wikipedia tend to receive more academic citations, suggesting that Wikipedia visibility is closely linked to scholarly impact and citation frequency.

Correlation Between Wikipedia Citations and Academic Citations

Thompson, N., & Hanley, D. (2018). Science is shaped by wikipedia: Evidence from a randomized control trial. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3039505. 

Science is shaped by wikipedia: Evidence from a randomized control trial

There is an evident increase in citing Wikipedia in academic and scientific journals due to its consistency in referencing other publications. There also seems to be a positive correlation between a journal’s success and the inclusion of Wikipedia in its reference list because Wikipedia is increasingly citing other scholarly publications in its articles. 

Bridging the gap between Wikipedia and academia

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 tested the hypothesisthat PubMed articles referenced in Wikipedia have higher impact. A correlation was found between the number of PubMed journals cited in Wikipedia and the journal's impact factor, based on the number of citations a journal article has and its F1000 score. What was concluded was that the higher a journal's impact score, the the more likely it would be cited in Wikipedia. 

Exploring the Use of Social Media to Measure Journal Article Impact

A positive correlation was found between Wikipedia and academic rankings on all different types of scholarly entities. Authors, papers, and keywords mentioned in Wikipedia also rank higher in the scholarly community than those that are not mentioned. Ranking was partly calculated by the number of times it has been mentioned or cited. 

A Comparative Study of Academic impact and Wikipedia Ranking

There has been a steady increase in the number of Wikipedia citations in research, mainly from research conducted and published by academic institutions all around the world. While scholars continue to contribute to a variety of Wikipedia articles, they are simultaneously citing Wikipedia articles in their research. 

The visibility of Wikipedia in scholarly publications

This article teaaches the reader how to increase visibility for articles, specifically how to increase the number of times an article is cited. One of the methods included is contributing to Wikipedia and an example is given in which an article that was references in Wikipedia has a significant number of more citations than other articles written by the same author. 

Maximized Research Impact: An Effective Strategies for Increasing Citations

The use of Wikipedia citations in scholarly sources, specifically scholarly journal publications, has been continuously increasing. One of the main reasons research tends to cite Wikipedia is for purposes of background information and introduction.  

A study of citations to Wikipedia in scholarly publications

There is a correlation between Wikipedia articles and citations in scientific journals, as seen in the evident increase in Wikipedia citations found in Scopus publications. Furthermore, Wikipedia citations can vary depending on the subject of interest. Wikipedia articles are cited more in book-based fields compared to scholarly publications. On the other hand, Wikipedia articles can be found citing recent scientific publications in disciplines such as information and computer science. 

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

A journal's impact factor serves as a consistent predictor of whether its contents will be referenced in Wikipedia articles. Additionally, open access journals are 47% more likely to be cited on Wikipedia compared to non-open access journals.

Learn Before

Related

Learn After