The latest issue of the journal “Biblioteka” published an article on the analysis of citations to scientific works in Wikipedia. The analysis covered 332 million references in 61 million Wikipedia articles in 309 language versions. In order to standardize the metadata of important sources of information on multilingual Wikipedia, data from the OpenAlex, an open catalog of authors and scientific publications, were additionally used. The results of scientific research were presented during the First Poznań Conference “Bibliometric analyses of Open Science”.
High-quality Wikipedia articles must be based on reliable and trustworthy sources of information. Citations and links to scientific literature are often perceived as more valuable than information found on publicly available websites. This is due to the fact that scientific materials go through a rigorous verification process by experts in a given field and are published by renowned academic institutions. As a result, information from such sources is usually more thoroughly checked and more precise, which translates into higher quality and credibility of the content on Wikipedia.
More information can be found in the article entitled “The Most Cited Scientific Information Sources in Wikipedia Articles Across Various Languages” in the journal Biblioteka, published by the Poznan University Library. The wide range of subjects of the research periodical includes issues related to the history of books, libraries and their collections, current librarianship, bibliology, research information and documentation and media studies.
Sources: kie.ue.poznan.pl, ue.poznan.pl