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
Perhaps because scientific papers are primary sources http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:PRIMARY#Primary.2C_secondary_and_tert...
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
--
- I use this address for lists; send personal messages to phoebe.ayers
<at> gmail.com *
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Nice information, thanks for sharing!
I think it's quite low. In that a) PLoS is a sister project which we should be supporting and following closely; many of their editors are wikipedians b) Every one of their articles is about a notable topic and a reliable primary source c) We could generate a useful todo list by finding a home for every article they choose to publish.
This reminds me of the way that our inclusion of the CC-SA khan academy videos - all those published up until mid-2010 at least - on commons is remarkably low, even though they are now already available transcoded into ogv. Until a group of editors actively sees a source of valuable knowledge as such and as something to incorporate, we often don't use knowledge that is already out there, even when freely licensed.
SJ
wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org