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