IMPACT OF WIKIPEDIA ON CITATION TRENDS - Guest editorial
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EXCLI Journal 2013;12:15-19 – ISSN 1611-2156
Received: November 28, 2012, accepted: January 08, 2012, published: January 15, 2013
Guest editorial:
IMPACT OF WIKIPEDIA ON CITATION TRENDS
Sayed-Amir Marashi**, Seyed Mohammad Amin Hosseini-Nami, Khadijeh Alishah,
Mahdieh Hadi, Ali Karimi, Saeedeh Hosseinian, Rouhallah RamezaniFard,
Reihaneh Sadat Mirhassani, Zhaleh Hosseini, Zahra Shojaie
Department of Biotechnology, College of Science, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran
All authors contributed equally to the manuscript.
** corresponding author: e-mail address: marashi@ut.ac.ir
ABSTRACT
It has been suggested that the “visibility” of an article influences its citation count. More spe-
cifically, it is believed that the social media can influence article citations.Here we tested the
hypothesis that inclusion of scholarly references in Wikipedia affects the citation trends. To
perform this analysis, we introduced a citation “propensity” measure, which is inspired by the
concept of amino acid propensity for protein secondary structures. We show that although ci-
tation counts generally increase during time, the citation “propensity” does not increase after
inclusion of a reference in Wikipedia.
Citation analysis is of central im- Carter, 2009). On the other hand, it is be-
portance in research evaluation (Adam, lieved that many authors do not necessarily
2002; Bird, 2008; Bornmann et al., 2008; read the articles to cite them (Braun et al.,
Fava et al., 2004; Garfield, 1972; Gisvold, 2010; Marashi, 2005), but rather adopt cita-
1999), in spite of its shortcomings (Sancho, tions from the reference list of some subse-
1992; Seglen, 1997). Moreover, almost all quent papers (Braun et al., 2010). All these
bibliometric measures, including impact findings suggest that citations to an article
factor (Garfield, 2006; Whitehouse, 2002) might strongly depend on the visibility, ra-
and h-index (Glänzel, 2006; Hirsch, 2007), ther than the merit of the article.
are functions of article citations. As a result, With the popularity of Web 2.0 in re-
it is also important to study factors and var- cent years, it has been suggested that the
iables which can influence citation counts. social media can also influence scientific
It is generally believed that the “visibil- article citations (Bar-Ilan et al., 2012;
ity” of an article can influence its citation Eysenbach, 2011; Li and Thelwall, 2012).
count. Lay media are previously suggested One of these social websites is the free
to have a role in increasing the citation online encyclopedia Wikipedia
counts of a scientific article (Callaham et (http://en.wikipedia.org). Although scien-
al., 2002; Phillips et al., 1991). Some au- tific entries in Wikipedia are typically writ-
thors have reported that, on average, open ten by anonymous authors, many scientists
access articles are cited more than non-open may still try to find information in this
access articles (Lawrence, 2001; Norris et website, because of its high visibility and
al., 2008), although this claim is disputed the simplicity of the language used (Figure
by others (Calver and Bradley, 2010; Davis, 1).
2011; Davis et al., 2008; Lansingh and
15EXCLI Journal 2013;12:15-19 – ISSN 1611-2156
Received: November 28, 2012, accepted: January 08, 2012, published: January 15, 2013
600
500
Number of publications
400
300
200
100
0
2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010
Year
Figure 1: Number of publications citing Wikipedia from 2004 to 2010. The data are obtained from
Scopus (http://www.scopus.com/) by searching for the word “Wikipedia” in “source title”.
Figure 1 suggests that Wikipedia entries observed. In a closer look, the analyzed ar-
have high visibility to the authors of schol- ticles, on average, have an increasing trend
arly articles, especially in recent years. In in the years [-2,-1,0]. However, this in-
the present work, we investigate whether creasing trend does not continue in years +1
the opposite is also true, i.e., inclusion of and +2. In all three cases in Figure 2, name-
scholarly references in Wikipedia signifi- ly “Social systems”, “Chaos theory” and
cantly affects the citation trends. “Systems biology”, either in year +1 or in
The Materials and Methods of this work year +2, a decrease in the citation trend is
are presented in the Supplementary Infor- observable. This observation may question
mation. the increasing trend of the citations.
In the first part of this study, we inves- One may argue that the observed in-
tigated the effect of inclusion of articles in crease in the number of citations occurs in-
Wikipedia on their citation counts. The in- dependently of inclusion of article in Wiki-
clusion time was defined as the origin of pedia. For example, such a trend is ex-
time, i.e., year zero. Citation analysis was pected because of the inclusion of an in-
performed on the five-year period of [-2,- creasing number of articles in Scopus dur-
1,0,+1,+2]. Normalized citation count in ing time. Therefore, the observed increase
year i, CiNorm, was computed for each of the in Figure 1 may not be more than what is
analyzed articles. Average CiNorm values are expected by chance.
shown in Figure 2.
From this figure, it is obvious that rela-
tively high coefficients of determination (R2
values) in the linear regression of data are
16EXCLI Journal 2013;12:15-19 – ISSN 1611-2156
Received: November 28, 2012, accepted: January 08, 2012, published: January 15, 2013
(A) Social systems (B) Chaos theory
0.8 0.7
R2 = 0.6182 R2 = 0.8281
0.7
0.68
0.6
0.66
Norm
Norm
0.5
Ci
Ci
0.64
0.4
0.62
0.3
0.2 0.6
-2 -1 0 1 2 -2 -1 0 1 2
Year Year
(C) Systems biology
0.74
R2 = 0.8496
0.7
0.66
Norm
Ci
0.62
0.58
0.54
-2 -1 0 1 2
Year
Figure 2: Normalized citation count before and after inclusion in Wikipedia. The reported R2 values
are related to fitting of the data to the best-fit linear model.
In order to study the citations while cor- ed in α-helix or β-sheet structures (Chou
recting for the intrinsically increasing cita- and Fasman, 1974; Marashi et al., 2007).
tion counts, we computed the citation pro- Figure 3 shows the results of the pro-
pensity of the articles (see the Materials and pensity analysis. In years 0 and +1, in all of
Methods section). The citation propensity the three cases, especially in case of “Sys-
in year i, Pi, measures the tendency of an tems biology”, citation propensity is almost
article to be cited more than what is ex- constant and close to 1. However, in year
pected by chance. Pi>1 means high citation +2 in all of the cases we observe a consid-
tendency in year i compared to a random erable decrease in the propensities.
year. PiEXCLI Journal 2013;12:15-19 – ISSN 1611-2156
Received: November 28, 2012, accepted: January 08, 2012, published: January 15, 2013
1.3 Bird SB. Journal impact factors, h indices,
and citation analyses in toxicology. J Med
Toxicol 2008;4:261-74.
Social systems
1 Chaos theory Bornmann L, Mutz R, Neuhaus C, Daniel
Pi
Systems biology
HD. Citation counts for research evalua-
tion: standards of good practice for analy-
zing bibliometric data and presenting and
0.7
-2 -1 0 1 2
interpreting results. Ethics Sci Environ
Year Politics 2008;8:93-102.
Figure 3: Propensity of citations (PC) before Braun T, Glänzel W, Schubert A. On sleep-
and after inclusion of the reference in Wikipedia ing beauties, princes and other tales of
citation distributions. Res Eval 2010;19:
195-202.
In the present study, we show that in-
clusion of articles in Wikipedia does not Callaham M, Wears RL, Weber E. Journal
increase the propensity of articles to be cit- prestige, publication bias, and other
ed. Interestingly, the reverse is reported to characteristics associated with citation of
be true, i.e., Wikipedia selectively lists high published studies in peer-reviewed journals.
impact articles shortly after their publica- J Am Med Assoc 2002;287:2847-50.
tion (Evans and Krauthammer, 2011).
It has been previously observed that vis- Calver MC, Bradley JS. Patterns of
ibility of an article, e.g., Mendeley user citations of open access and non-open
counts (Bar-Ilan et al., 2012; Li and access conservation biology journal papers
Thelwall, 2012), bookmarks in CiteULike and book chapters. Conserv Biol 2010;24:
(Bar-Ilan et al., 2012) and tweets in Twitter 872-80.
(Eysenbach, 2011) are reported to be corre-
lated to the citation counts of scholarly arti- Chou PY, Fasman GD. Conformational
cles. Does the article “impact” increase the- parameters for amino acids in helical, β-
se visibility measures, or the visibility is the sheet, and random coil regions calculated
cause of the increase in the scholarly cita- from proteins. Biochemistry 1974;13:211-
tion counts of the article? We believe that 22.
this interesting question is yet to be an-
swered. Davis PM. Open access, readership, citat-
ions: a randomized controlled trial of scien-
tific journal publishing. FASEB J 2011;25:
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