UPDATED 18:01 EDT / SEPTEMBER 22 2017

BIG DATA

Oops! Researchers find academics often use Wikipedia but rarely cite it

Academic researchers, beware: Your secret is out.

Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pittsburgh published an analysis this week showing that the online encyclopedia Wikipedia is materially affecting academic research, even though the authors of that research almost never cite it as a source. The study used a statistical model to establish that Wikipedia is also helping advance the progress of science worldwide, particularly in less developed countries.

Neil C. Thompson of the MIT Sloan School and Douglas Hanley from the University of Pittsburgh found that the language of new scientific articles posted on Wikipedia begins showing up in mainstream academic journals within a few months, with duplication particularly frequent among the most prestigious journals. This is despite the fact that only 0.01 percent of scientific articles cite Wikipedia as a source.

The findings are bound to stoke the controversy in the academic world over the value of Wikipedia as a reference. Many colleges specifically prohibit citations to the online encyclopedia in student and faculty papers, reasoning that crowdsourced definitions can’t possibly be as accurate and comprehensive as those created by researchers. This is despite the fact that studies that have found that Wikipedia articles are considerably longer and contain fewer errors than those in mainstream encyclopedias.

A 2009 study found that 26 percent of junior physicians regularly consult Wikipedia for medical advice and that 70 percent use it at least occasionally. “Professionals are using this pretty intensely for scientific and professional information,” Thompson said.

Keyword analysis

The researchers commissioned graduate students to write 43 graduate-level articles on chemistry topics not already covered by Wikipedia. They conducted a keyword analysis of related academic journals six months before and six months after each article was published to see how often the words used in Wikipedia were duplicated in academic research. They compared the results to a control group of unpublished articles about similar topics.

The research showed a statistically significant correlation between the presence of a Wikipedia article and comparable terminology in academic work. For a typical article in the field, Wikipedia influenced one out of every 300 words. An even greater correlation was found among the journals that were publishing cutting-edge research, where about one in every 140 words was affected. Almost none of the articles studied cited Wikipedia as a source.

Thompson and Hanley chose not to focus on the dirty little academic secret they may have exposed but rather on the importance of Wikipedia as a dissemination tool. “We interpret this as supporting the hypothesis that new Wikipedia articles created from cutting-edge science become a pathway for others to learn about those ideas,” they wrote. “That is, Wikipedia disseminates knowledge.”

Embarrassed?

However, they did speculate about why Wikipedia citations are so rare. One possible reason is embarrassment, Thompson said in a Google hangout (below) sponsored by the Wikimedia Foundation. “There is a sense that there are certain things that academics do and citing an encyclopedia is something academics shy away from,” he said. A more benevolent theory is that Wikipedia content is considered part of the corpus of public knowledge and so doesn’t need a citation.

An important finding was that scientific authors in poorer countries were more likely to be influenced by Wikipedia than those in more economically developed countries by a factor of more than two to one, suggesting that the online reference sources help level the educational playing field. “These results suggest that public repositories of knowledge, such as Wikipedia, have an equity-improving effect, disproportionately benefiting those with less access,” they wrote.

The authors complimented Wikipedia for its breadth of coverage, noting that it includes more than 90 percent of scientific topics covered in a standard undergraduate syllabus and 43 percent at the introductory graduate level.

The articles the graduate students created got excellent traction, averaging more than 4,400 views per month and accumulating more than 2 million views over two years. That established a statistically valid causal change of influence.

Ironically, MIT, which sponsored and publicized the study, prohibits the use of Wikipedia in academic research.

Image: Wikipedia


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