Dear Phoebe,
On 20-04-2012 19:31, phoebe ayers wrote:
Has there been any research done into: the number of
citations (e.g.
to books, journal articles, online sources, everything together) on
Wikipedia (any language, or all)? The distribution of citations over
different kinds or qualities of articles? # of uses of citation
templates? Anything like this?
I realize this is hard to count, averages are meaningless in this
context, and any number will no doubt be imprecise! But anything would
be helpful. I have vague memories of seeing some citation studies like
this but don't remember the details.
Thank to Paolo Massa for mentioning the following First Monday paper in
his answer to Phoebe: my "Scientific citations in Wikipedia"
http://www2.imm.dtu.dk/pubdb/views/edoc_download.php/5271/pdf/imm5271.pdf
I got a follow-up on that on Wikimania - clustering the citations -
reporting a bit on the longitudianal development.
"Clustering of scientific citations in Wikipedia "
http://www2.imm.dtu.dk/pubdb/views/edoc_download.php/5666/pdf/imm5666.pdf
The results are available on this page:
http://www2.imm.dtu.dk/pubdb/views/edoc_download.php/5666/pdf/imm5666.pdf
(Note that the server were the webserver is runnings is presently
halfway crashed, so the results might not be accessible. Although the
presently are for me - I will look into that in the coming days)
If anyone wants to look more closely into which journals are cited I got
an XML-file with journal names and variations
http://neuro.imm.dtu.dk/services/brededatabase/wojous.xml
Also there are further journals and naming variations in the Brede Wiki
The Wikimania slides is available from:
http://www2.imm.dtu.dk/pubdb/views/edoc_download.php/5677/pdf/imm5677.pdf
What I noted (as seen on the slides) was that the count of 'cite
journal' citations depended on the ref-tag. The GeneWiki bot added a lot
of citations around 2008/2009 without the ref-tag and the number of
citations was very much increased by that. I wonder if other forms of
citations depend very much on bot-additions.
Furthermore:
There has been a few blog post on citations. Ed Summers did one:
http://inkdroid.org/journal/2010/08/25/top-hosts-referenced-in-wikipedia-pa…
and I also did one looking on the 'cite news' template:
http://fnielsen.posterous.com/top-news-cites-referenced-from-wikipedia
Finn Årup Nielsen
http://www.imm.dtu.dk/~fn/