Twenty years of Wikipedia in scholarly publications: a bibliometric network analysis of the thematic and citation landscape

Mostafa, Mohamed M.

doi:10.1007/s11135-023-01626-7

Cited by 5 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 145 publications

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“…In this sense, Wikipedia, too, can prove a valuable addition in the form of alternative metrics. Asking which papers are cited on Wikipedia and in which context, may provide insight into what parts of academic research are actually reaching the public [ 7 , 56 , 57 ]. As such, our tools can join and enrich existing studies on the history of contemporary science, augmenting work in the field of bibliometrics or even altmetrics, with Wikipedia.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Wikipedia as a tool for contemporary history of science: A case study on CRISPR

Benjakob,

Guley,

Sevin

et al. 2023

PLoS ONE

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Rapid developments and methodological divides hinder the study of how scientific knowledge accumulates, consolidates and transfers to the public sphere. Our work proposes using Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, as a historiographical source for contemporary science. We chose the high-profile field of gene editing as our test case, performing a historical analysis of the English-language Wikipedia articles on CRISPR. Using a mixed-method approach, we qualitatively and quantitatively analyzed the CRISPR article’s text, sections and references, alongside 50 affiliated articles. These, we found, documented the CRISPR field’s maturation from a fundamental scientific discovery to a biotechnological revolution with vast social and cultural implications. We developed automated tools to support such research and demonstrated its applicability to two other scientific fields–coronavirus and circadian clocks. Our method utilizes Wikipedia as a digital and free archive, showing it can document the incremental growth of knowledge and the manner scientific research accumulates and translates into public discourse. Using Wikipedia in this manner compliments and overcomes some issues with contemporary histories and can also augment existing bibliometric research.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Wikipedia as a tool for contemporary history of science: A case study on CRISPR

Benjakob,

Guley,

Sevin

et al. 2023

PLoS ONE

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In this sense, Wikipedia, too, can prove a valuable addition in the form of alternative metrics. Asking which papers are cited on Wikipedia and in which context, may provide insight into what parts of academic research are actually reaching the public (Jemielniak 2019)(Mostafa 2021)(Mostafa 2023). As such, our work can join and enrich existing studies on the history of contemporary science, augmenting their work in the field of bibliometrics or even altmetrics, with Wikipedia.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Wikipedia as a tool for contemporary history of science: A case study on CRISPR

Benjakob

Guley

Sevin

et al. 2022

Preprint

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Rapid developments and methodological divides hinder the study of how scientific knowledge accumulates, consolidates and transfers to the public sphere. Our work proposes using Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, as a historiographical source regarding contemporary science. We chose the high-profile field of gene editing as our test case, performing a historical analysis of the English-language Wikipedia articles on CRISPR. Using a mixed method approach, we qualitatively and quantitatively analyzed its text, sections and references, alongside 50 affiliated articles. These, we found, documented CRISPR's maturation from a fundamental scientific discovery to a biotechnological revolution with vast social and cultural implications. We developed automated tools to support such research generically and demonstrated its applicability on two other scientific fields we have previously studied - COVID-19 and Circadian clocks. This method makes use of Wikipedia as a digital and free archive, documenting the incremental growth of knowledge and the manner scientific research accumulates and translates into public discourse. Using Wikipedia in this manner compliments and overcomes some issues with contemporary histories and can also augment existing bibliometric research.

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“…Bibliometrics is a well established practice within the history of science (46) and has long been used in historical research (47,48) and digital humanities (49). Past studies into the bibliometrics of scientific topics on Wikipedia found that these are linked to wider trends in scientific knowledge (3,9), and tend to be from high-impact factor journals from both niche journals or general ones (2,11). In the case of the ECC and our corpus, this was also found to be true: we saw that among those academic journals cited there were prestigious field-specific journals like Nature Climate Change.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

High Impact: Wikipedia sources and edit history document two decades of the climate change field

Benjakob,

Jouveshomme,

Collet

et al. 2023

Preprint

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Since being founded in 2001, Wikipedia has grown into a trusted source of knowledge online, feeding Google search results and serving as training data for ChatGPT. Understanding the accuracy of its information, the sources behind its articles and their role in the transference of knowledge to the public are becoming increasingly important questions. Meanwhile, climate change has moved to the forefront of scientific and public discourse after years of warnings from the scientific community. Therefore, to understand how it was represented on English Wikipedia, we deployed a mixed-method approach on the article for “Effects of climate change” (ECC), its edit history and references, as well as hundreds of associated articles dealing with climate change in different ways. Using automated tools to scrape data from Wikipedia, we saw new articles were created as climatology-related knowledge grew and permeated into other fields, reflecting a growing body of climate research and growing public interest. Our qualitative textual analysis shows how specific descriptions of climatic phenomena became less hypothetical, reflecting the real-world public debate. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had a big impact on content and structure, we found using a bibliometric analysis, and what made this possible, we also discovered through a historical analysis, was the impactful work of just a few editors. This research suggests Wikipedia’s articles documented the real-world events around climate change and its wider acceptance - initially a hypothesis that soon became a regretful reality. Overall, our findings highlight the unique role IPCC reports play in making scientific knowledge about climate change actionable to the public, and underscore Wikipedia’s ability to facilitate access to research. This work demonstrates Wikipedia can be researched using both computational and qualitative methods to better understand transference of scientific information to the public and the history of contemporary science.

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Twenty years of Wikipedia in scholarly publications: a bibliometric network analysis of the thematic and citation landscape

Cited by 5 publications

References 145 publications

Wikipedia as a tool for contemporary history of science: A case study on CRISPR

Wikipedia as a tool for contemporary history of science: A case study on CRISPR

Wikipedia as a tool for contemporary history of science: A case study on CRISPR

High Impact: Wikipedia sources and edit history document two decades of the climate change field

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