B - Scientific citations in Wikipedia

Nielsen FA. Scientific citations in Wikipedia. First Monday 2007;(8).


Wikipedia, the Internet–based encyclopædia is steadyly growing in popularity also for scientific research, but some critics have questioned the quality of entries.
Citing Wikipedia as an authoritative source may be questionable: biased coverage and lack of sources are among the most common “ Wikipedia risks.” this study examines the outbound links from Wikipedia articles to articles in scientific journals and compares them against journal statistics from Journal Citation Reports such as impact factors. The results show an increasing use of structured citation markup and good agreement with citation patterns seen in the scientific literature, though with a slight tendency to cite articles in high–impact journals such as Nature and Science . These results increase confidence in Wikipedia as a reliable information resource for science in general.

http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue12_8/nielsen/index.html

Thanks to Margaret Cooter

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