Wikipedia Citations

What it is

Wikipedia Citations refer to the number of Wikipedia entries that mention a particular scholarly output.

Wikipedia citations can be found directly in entries in Wikipedia, and are also tracked by metrics source providers, such as PlumX, Altmetric, Impactstory.

How it works

Properly formatted citations in most Wikipedia entries can be tracked if they provide a Wikipedia citation tag, and mention a scholarly output with a persistent identifier, such as a DOI. In addition, different metrics source providers can yield different counts. The provider may also provide access to the full-text of the citing Wikipedia pages.

Depending on the context of the citation, Wikipedia references can be interpreted to indicate several kinds of impact, such as a work’s defining influence on a field. How and where an item is referenced is more important than the count of Wikipedia mentions. One study suggests that indicators based on Wikipedia mentions are probably more useful for books than for articles, particularly in the arts and humanities, social sciences, and some areas of science such as physics and astronomy (1). The same study suggests that Wikipedia citations only loosely reflect scholarly impact, but may be indicators of educational and other types of impact (1).

What to keep in mind

As an online collaborative encyclopedia, Wikipedia’s unprotected pages may be edited by anyone, including unregistered users. While Wikipedia has guidelines for using and referencing sources, the anonymous nature of its editorial process has inspired numerous researchers to question the motivations (2) and biases of content contributors.

The content of Wikipedia knowledge bases differs for each language. For example, the content of the Spanish language Wikipedia knowledge base is different from the Korean language knowledge base.

Wikipedia mentions may not indicate a positive review/appraisal of the scholarly output. Counts do not reflect whether the mention was positive, negative, or neutral.

Raw Wikipedia citation counts should not be interpreted as a direct measure of quality or impact. Rather, citation counts should always be considered in light of their individual contexts, which may or may not be positive or appropriate.

The tracking method is specific to the metric source provider. Altmetric tracks and calculates Wikipedia citations via identifiers and titles that appear in valid citations across the English, Finnish, and Swedish-language Wikipedias, whereas PlumX mines the full text entry of all Wikipedia pages for DOIs, PMIDs, and URLs.

Wikipedia citations and other altmetrics have been shown to diverge from expert reviewers’ evaluation scores in the REF 2014. Additionally, research suggests that Wikipedia’s coverage of the published literature is relatively narrow (3). One study (1) showed that only 5% of biomedical articles have been cited on Wikipedia.

Learn More

Kousha, Keyvan; Thelwall, Mike (2017). “Are Wikipedia citations important evidence of the impact of scholarly articles and books?”. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, v. 68, n. 3, pp. 762-779. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.23694

Blog mentions
Citations
Policy citations

References

  1. Kousha, Keyvan; Thelwall, Mike (2017). “Are Wikipedia citations important evidence of the impact of scholarly articles and books?”. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, v. 68, n. 3, pp. 762-779. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.23694
  2. Yang, H. L., & Lai, C. Y. (2010). Motivations of Wikipedia content contributors. Computers in Human Behavior, 26(6), 1377-1383. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2010.04.011
  3. Priem, J., Piwowar, H. A., & Hemminger, B. M. (2012). Altmetrics in the wild: Using social media to explore scholarly impact. https://arxiv.org/abs/1203.4745

Last updated April 2022