Scientific citations in Wikipedia

TL;DR

This paper assesses the quality and reliability of scientific citations in Wikipedia by analyzing outbound links to scientific journals and comparing citation patterns with journal impact factors, finding generally good agreement.

Contribution

It provides an empirical analysis of Wikipedia's scientific citations, highlighting the increasing use of structured markup and alignment with scientific literature citation patterns.

Findings

Growing use of structured citation markup

Good agreement with scientific literature citation patterns

Tendency to cite high-impact journals like Nature and Science

Abstract

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.