Wikipedia Citations: A comprehensive dataset of citations with identifiers extracted from English Wikipedia

TL;DR

This paper presents Wikipedia Citations, a large dataset of extracted citations from Wikipedia, including scholarly identifiers, enabling analysis of Wikipedia's source reliance and citation patterns.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive, publicly available dataset of Wikipedia citations with scholarly identifiers, facilitating research on source reliability and citation analysis.

Findings

6.7% of Wikipedia articles cite journal articles with DOIs

Wikipedia cites only 2% of Web of Science articles with DOIs

29.3 million citations extracted from 6.1 million articles

Abstract

Wikipedia's contents are based on reliable and published sources. To this date, relatively little is known about what sources Wikipedia relies on, in part because extracting citations and identifying cited sources is challenging. To close this gap, we release Wikipedia Citations, a comprehensive dataset of citations extracted from Wikipedia. A total of 29.3M citations were extracted from 6.1M English Wikipedia articles as of May 2020, and classified as being to books, journal articles or Web contents. We were thus able to extract 4.0M citations to scholarly publications with known identifiers -- including DOI, PMC, PMID, and ISBN -- and further equip an extra 261K citations with DOIs from Crossref. As a result, we find that 6.7% of Wikipedia articles cite at least one journal article with an associated DOI, and that Wikipedia cites just 2% of all articles with a DOI currently indexed in the Web of Science. We release our code to allow the community to extend upon our work and update the dataset in the future.