Hi there,
Great project; massive but will be much appreciated. We did something similar for empirical studies of Open Source, recently accepted at ACM Computing Surveys (PDF pre-print available here [1], article not in print until 2012 (!! that's another email entirely, bah))
I recognize the need to cut down the number of articles for review, we reviewed around 600 and that was a multi-year effort. We did that mainly by excluding conceptual (hence empirical) or passing reference articles (ie we did a two-step filter on many more articles), but were forced to only do journal articles for updates during the (long) revision process. I regret that necessity, it decreases the utility of the work.
Given the publication venues of choice for many academics in this community I do wonder if you aren't shooting yourself in the foot by excluding peer-reviewed conferences and restricting to journals. Personally I'd rather read a review that included the top journals and top conferences than one that included all journals. Or even rather read a review over a shorter time period that included publications over journals and conferences, or on more specified topics. The interesting question is, "what do we know about wikipedia" not "what did we publish in journals about wikipedia". In particular you will find you have systematically excluded the contribution of HCI authors.
Given the commendable and massive effort you are providing (and your approach to coverage below is really interesting), getting that wrong at the outset seems a shame.
Best regards, James Howison
[1] Crowston, K., Wei, K., Howison, J., and Wiggins, A. (2012). Free (libre) open source software development: What we know and what we do not know. ACM Computing Surveys, 44(2): http://floss.syr.edu/content/freelibre-open-source-software-development-what...
On Mar 14, 2011, at 13:58, Chitu Okoli wrote:
Hi everyone,
We are a research group conducting a systematic literature review on Wikipedia-related peer-reviewed academic studies published in the English language. (Although there are many excellent studies in other languages, we unfortunately do not have the resources to systematically review these at any kind of acceptable scholarly level. Also, our study is about Wikipedia only, not about other Wikimedia Foundation projects. However, we do include studies about other language Wikipedias, as long as the studies are published in English.) We have completed a search using many major databases of scholarly research. In a separate thread, we will also talk about research questions related to our review.
As of the end of November 2010, when we stopped searching, we had identified over 2,100 peer-reviewed studies that have "wikipedia", "wikipedian", or "wikipedians" in their title, abstract or keywords. As this number of studies is far too large for conducting a review synthesis, we have decided to focus only on peer-reviewed journal publications and doctoral theses; we identified 625 such studies. In addition, we identified around 1,500 peer-reviewed conference articles; we will discuss these in a separate thread.
In addition to the scholarly databases that we searched, we have very carefully compared the lists of studies from the following Wikimedia pages to verify what we may have missed:
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Academic_studies_of_Wikipedia
- http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Research_Bibliography
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_studies_about_Wikipedia
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_in_research
- http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research
From these pages, we identified an additional 13 journal articles and 3 doctoral theses that we had not previously identified. These were either articles published after November 2010, articles in journals indexed in very few scholarly databases, a few European journals, and doctoral theses from outside North America. After adding these, we have identified a total of 638 publications, of which 610 journal articles and 28 doctoral theses. (However, as we begin to read these, we will remove some from our lists if we find that they are really not about Wikipedia.)
We have now updated the following page with the peer-reviewed journal articles and doctoral theses we have identified: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Academic_studies_of_Wikipedia. Please note that we have only updated the sections on peer-reviewed journal articles and on theses; we have not updated other sections with newly identified studies, except for correcting some misclassified items.
To help us in identifying all eligible studies, we would really appreciate it if you could look at the sections on peer-reviewed journal articles and theses in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Academic_studies_of_Wikipedia, and send us any citations (by yourself or others) that you know are missing. In particular, please inform us of:
- Doctoral theses conducted outside North America
- Peer-reviewed articles in journals not well indexed by North American databases
- Peer-reviewed journal articles and doctoral theses published or accepted and forthcoming after November 2010.
Thanks for your help.
Chitu Okoli, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada (http://chitu.okoli.org/professional/open-content/wikipedia-and-open-content....) Arto Lanamäki, University of Agder, Kristiansand, Norway Mohamad Mehdi, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada Mostafa Mesgari, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada
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