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