Abstract
Referencing scholarly documents as information sources on Wikipedia is important because they complement and improve the quality of Wikipedia content. However, little is known about them, such as how rapidly they are added and how fresh they are. To answer these questions, we conduct a time-series analysis of adding scholarly references to the English Wikipedia as of October 2021. Consequently, we detect no tendencies in Wikipedia articles created recently to refer to more fresh references because the time lag between publishing the scholarly articles and adding references of the corresponding paper to Wikipedia articles has remained generally constant over the years. In contrast, tendencies to decrease over time in the time lag between creating Wikipedia articles and adding the first scholarly references are observed. The percentage of cases where scholarly references were added simultaneously as Wikipedia articles are created is found to have increased over the years, particularly since 2007–2008. This trend can be seen as a response to the policy changes of the Wikipedia community at that time that was adopted by various editors, rather than depending on massive activities by a small number of editors.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Day 1 report of Wikimania 2006 - Wikinews, the free news source. https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Day_1_report_of_Wikimania_2006. Accessed 14 Sept 2022
Wikipedia Seigenthaler biography incident - Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Seigenthaler_biography_incident. Accessed 14 Sept 2022
Wikipedia: Core content policies - Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Core_content_policies. Accessed 14 Sept 2022
WikiProject Report: Molecular and Cellular Biology. Wikipedia Signpost. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2008-01-28/WikiProject_report. Accessed 14 Sept 2022
USATODAY.com - A false Wikipedia ‘biography’ (2005). http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2005-11-29-wikipedia-edit_x.htm. Accessed 14 Sept 2022
Bilder, G.: Geoffrey Bilder: Strategic Initiatives Update #crossref15. https://www.slideshare.net/CrossRef/geoffrey-bilder-crossref15. Accessed 14 Sept 2022
Costas, R., van Leeuwen, T.N., Bordons, M.: Referencing patterns of individual researchers: do top scientists rely on more extensive information sources? J. Am. Soc. Inform. Sci. Technol. 63(12), 2433–2450 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.22662
Crossref: Crossref Metadata API JSON Format (2021). https://github.com/CrossRef/rest-api-doc/blob/master/api_format.md
Halfaker, A., Taraborelli, D.: Research: Scholarly article citations in Wikipedia - Meta (2019). https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Scholarly_article_citations_in_Wikipedia
Halfaker, A., Kittur, A., Riedl, J.: Don’t bite the newbies: how reverts affect the quantity and quality of Wikipedia work. In: Proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration, WikiSym 2011, pp. 163–172 (2011)
Kikkawa, J., Takaku, M., Yoshikane, F.: DOI links on Wikipedia: analyses of English, Japanese, and Chinese Wikipedias. In: Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Asia-Pacific Digital Libraries (ICADL 2016), pp. 369-380 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49304-6_40
Kikkawa, J., Takaku, M., Yoshikane, F.: A method to identify the edits adding bibliographic references to wikipedia. J. Japan Soc. Inf. Knowl. 30(3), 370–389 (2020). https://doi.org/10.2964/jsik_2020_033, (in Japanese, English abstract available)
Kikkawa, J., Takaku, M., Yoshikane, F.: Analyses of Wikipedia editors adding bibliographic references based on DOI links. J. Jpn. Soc. Inf. Knowl. 30(1), 21-41 (2020). https://doi.org/10.2964/jsik_004, (in Japanese, English abstract available)
Kikkawa, J., Takaku, M., Yoshikane, F.: Dataset of first appearances of the scholarly bibliographic references on English Wikipedia articles as of 1 March 2017 and as of 1 October 2021. Zenodo (2021). https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5595573
Kikkawa, J., Takaku, M., Yoshikane, F.: Time-series analyses of the editors and their edits for adding bibliographic references on Wikipedia. J. Japan Soc. Inf. Knowl. 31(1), 3–19 (2021). https://doi.org/10.2964/jsik_2020_037, (in Japanese, English abstract available)
Kikkawa, J., Takaku, M., Yoshikane, F.: Dataset of first appearances of the scholarly bibliographic references on Wikipedia articles. Scientific Data 9, article no. 85, pp. 1–11 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-022-01190-z
Kousha, K., Thelwall, M.: Are Wikipedia citations important evidence of the impact of scholarly articles and books? J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci. 68(3), 762–779 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.23694
Larivière, V., Archambault, É., Gingras, Y.: Long-term variations in the aging of scientific literature: From exponential growth to steady-state science (1900–2004). J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci. Technol. 59(2), 288–296 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.20744
Lin, J., Fenner, M.: An analysis of Wikipedia references across PLOS publications. figshare (2014). https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1048991.v3
Mammalian Gene Collection (MGC) Program Team: Generation and initial analysis of more than 15,000 full-length human and mouse cDNA sequences. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 99(26), 16899–16903 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.242603899
Nielsen, F.Å.: Scientific citations in Wikipedia. First Monday 12(8) (2007). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v12i8.1997
Ota, T., Suzuki, Y., Nishikawa, T., et al.: Complete sequencing and characterization of 21,243 full-length human cDNAs. Nature Genetics 36(1), 40–45 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1038/ng1285
Pooladian, A., Borrego, Á.: Methodological issues in measuring citations in Wikipedia: a case study in Library and Information Science. Scientometrics 113(1), 455–464 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-017-2474-z
van Raan, A.F.J.: On growth, ageing, and fractal differentiation of science. Scientometrics 47(2), 347–362 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1005647328460
Teplitskiy, M., Lu, G., Duede, E.: Amplifying the impact of open access: Wikipedia and the diffusion of science. J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci. 68(9), 2116–2127 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.23687
Thelwall, M.: Does Astronomy research become too dated for the public? Wikipedia citations to Astronomy and Astrophysics journal articles 1996–2014. El Profesional de la Información 25(6), 893–900 (2016). https://doi.org/10.3145/epi.2016.nov.06
Varga, A.: The narrowing of literature use and the restricted mobility of papers in the sciences. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 119(17), e2117488119 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2117488119
Wikimedia Foundation: Editor Trends Study/Results - Strategic Planning. https://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Editor_Trends_Study/Results. Accessed 14 Sept 2022
Wikimedia Foundation: Wikimedia Downloads. https://dumps.wikimedia.org/backup-index.html. Accessed 14 Sept 2022
Wikipedia: User:ProteinBoxBot - Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:ProteinBoxBot. Accessed 14 Sept 2022
Wikipedia: User: Qbugbot - Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Qbugbot. Accessed 14 Sept 2022
Zhang, L., Glänzel, W.: A citation-based cross-disciplinary study on literature aging: part I—the synchronous approach. Scientometrics 111(3), 1573–1589 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-017-2289-y
Acknowledgments
This work was partially supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Numbers JP21K21303, JP22K18147, JP20K12543, and JP21K12592. The authors are deeply grateful to Professor Hideaki Takeda at the National Institute of Informatics (NII), Japan, for valuable suggestions and discussions. We would like to thank Editage (https://www.editage.com/) for the English language editing.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Kikkawa, J., Takaku, M., Yoshikane, F. (2023). Time Lag Analysis of Adding Scholarly References to English Wikipedia. In: Sserwanga, I., et al. Information for a Better World: Normality, Virtuality, Physicality, Inclusivity. iConference 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13972. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28032-0_33
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28032-0_33
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-28031-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-28032-0
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)