2012/3/24 phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki@gmail.com>

Of interest... an altmetrics paper published this week, "Altmetrics in
the Wild: Using Social Media to Explore Scholarly Impact"
http://arxiv.org/html/1203.4745v1

counts Wikipedia citations as one possible alt-metric for scholars. I
got lost in the statistics around relationship between alt and
traditional metrics and use, but one of the takeaways is that around
5% of their sample of 24,331 articles from PLOS (everything ever
published in PLOS) were cited in Wikipedia.

The article is interesting for other reasons, but I am intrigued by
this 5% number. What do you think of this measure? At first I thought
-- "wow, 5% (1200 articles) is pretty high! We are doing a good job at
citing the scholarly literature!" Then I thought -- "actually,
considering all the bio articles on Wikipedia, it's pretty low!" Then
I thought "but this is only PLOS, which has only been around for a
decade, so actually that's pretty high!"

Anyway, an interesting paper for the bibliometrics geeks among us.

cheers,
phoebe

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