On theSpanish Wikipedia, at the top of the list of most-cited sources in articles you’ll find: a “Catalog of Fishes”, a dictionary of minor planets, an encyclopedia of Argentinian films, a field guide to the songbirds of South America, and an atlas of Spanish popular culture.
Citations are the foundation of Wikipedia’s reliability: they trace the connection between content added by our community of volunteer contributors and its sources. For readers, citations provide a mechanism to validate and check for themselves that what Wikipedia says is sound and trustworthy: they act as a gateway towards a broader ecosystem of reliable knowledge. In an effort to spearhead more research on where Wikipedia gets its facts from, and to celebrate Open Citations Month, we asked ourselves: what are the most cited sources across all of Wikipedia’s language editions?
To answer this question, we published a dataset of every citation referencing an identifier across all 297 Wikipedia language editions. The dataset breaks down sources cited in each language by identifier–a PMID or PMC (for articles in the biomedical literature), a DOI (for scholarly papers), an ISBN (for book editions), or an ArXiV ID (for preprints).
What’s in the data?
The full dataset, extracted from the March 1, 2018 Wikipedia content dumps, includes a total of 15,693,732 records and shows important variations across languages in the kind of sources volunteer contributors cite. The dataset also only includes citations by identifier, which means not all citations on Wikipedia are reflected in the dataset; many more publications than the records included in this dataset are cited that don’t reference any identifier (and our next analysis will be able to tell you what percentage of total citations this dataset represents).
What types of sources are cited the most by language?
On average, the majority of publications cited by identifier across Wikipedia language editions are books. German Wikipedia – one of the top 5 language editions by number of articles – relies primarily on information sourced to book editions, with 87% of citations in the ISBN category. Conversely, English Wikipedia sources its information equally on scholarly publications and books, while Arabic Wikipedia uses more scholarly publications than books.
Preprint repositories such as ArXiv, represent a minority of publications, with less than 2% of citations in each language, and they are most prominently cited in Arabic Wikipedia. At least 5% of publications in Arabic and English Wikipedia are open access biomedical publications from PubMedCentral.
How fast are citations growing by language?
If we look at the percentage of total citations added over time, we note that some languages such as Arabic and Spanish are on a steady growth trajectory as of early 2018, while the general trend (black line) is flattening. Since the number of articles across all languages continues to grow, this suggests that in some languages the rate of citation is slowing down.
How often are sources cited and reused across articles and languages?
There are 4.5 million unique sources in the datasets. While on average, every source is cited 3.5 times, the vast majority of sources in this dataset are used less than 500 times across wikis. Only nine “super publications”’ are used more than 10,000 times.
What are the most cited sources?
Unsurprisingly, Wikipedians love reference works. The top 10 sources by citation across every Wikipedia language are all reference books or scientific articles describing large collections. Many of these publications have been cited by Wikipedians across large series of articles using powerful bots and automated tools.
- Updated world map of the Köppen-Geiger climate classification: 2,830,341 citations [doi.org/10.5194/hess-11-1633-2007]
- Prediction of Hydrophobic (Lipophilic) Properties of Small Organic Molecules Using Fragment Methods: An Analysis of AlogP and CLogP Methods: 21,350 citations [doi.org/10.1021/jp980230o]
- The status, quality, and expansion of the NIH full-length cDNA project: the Mammalian Gene Collection (MGC): 20,247 citations [doi.org/10.1101/gr.2596504]
- The de Vaucouleurs Atlas of Galaxies: 19,068 citations [ISBN: 9780521820486]
- The Complete New General Catalogue and Index Catalogues of Nebulae and Star Clusters by J. L. E. Dryer: 19,060 citations [ISBN: 9780933346512]
- Galaxies and How to Observe Them: 19,058 citations [ISBN: 9781852337520}
- A Concise History of Romania: 15,597 citations [ISBN: 9780521872386]
- Catalog of Fishes California Academy of Sciences: 11,980 citations, [ISBN: 0940228475]
- Dictionary of Minor Planet Names: 10,651 citations [ISBN: 9783540002383]
- National and religious composition of the population of Croatia, 1880-1991: By settlements: 8,230 citations [ISBN: 9789536667079]
Why does this data matter?
First off, it allows us to analyze, at scale, where Wikipedia gets its information from. Understanding the provenance of information used by Wikipedians, also allows us to lift a veil on its gaps—the types of sources, languages, and perspectives—that are not represented, which in turn can inform community efforts to improve coverage in underserved content areas. The data can also be reused by partners such as publishers, scholarly societies, and research projects to better understand how their works are used and found by the public.
As a freely licensed, CCO dataset, we hope researchers and partners will re-use and analyze this corpus for trends of interest to their fields and research projects. Critically, a list of the most cited sources also enables partners to try and make more or most of them accessible to readers. We can help drive digitization and open access efforts geared towards making the most commonly-cited sources free to access online.
Finally, with citations as an indicator of factual currency, knowing what works are supporting our shared knowledge gives us a glimpse into popular understanding–both how we know what we know, and what we know most about.
Reactions from friends and partners
Since this dataset should empower others to do their own analysis and incorporate insights from Wikipedia’s citations, we asked some of our friends and partners what they thought.
“Wikipedia plays a crucial role in democratizing access to knowledge and enriching our understanding of the world,“ said Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition). “This new citation dataset provides a deeper level of transparency and trustworthiness to its content, and opens exciting new paths for people learn, innovate and follow their curiosity.”
Geoffrey Bilder, Director of Strategic Initiatives at Crossref, said: “We are delighted to see the Wikimedia Foundation release this dataset that shows which research is most often cited in Wikipedia articles. Over the past ten years, we’ve been monitoring the rapid growth of links between Wikipedia and research outputs. It appears that Wikipedia is increasingly taking on the role of the “review article” and is set to become the de facto starting place for the researchers exploring subjects they are unfamiliar with. This means Wikipedia has become a vital gateway that drives users to published research articles and, as such, it has become one of the top referrers of DOIs in the world.”
Brewster Kahle, digital librarian, looked ahead: “At the Internet Archive, we believe in the value of verifiable information. We plan to use the citation data that Wikimedia Foundation has released to inform our digitization priorities, making the most important books available to researchers worldwide. We envision a future where every citation and reference in Wikipedia is a live link into a trusted repository like the Internet Archive, empowering every Wikipedia user to fact-check and verify the information they encounter online.”
“This dataset is a powerful new way to track how knowledge moves from the leading edge of scientific research into the broader collective minds of humankind as a whole,” said Jason Priem, co-founder of ImpactStory. “We’ll use it to help us fine-tune our efforts with Unpaywall in our goal to make scholarly papers open and accessible to everyone.”
What’s next?
This work extends and complements data first released in 2015, created with a python library designed by Aaron Halfaker and extended by Bahodir Mansurov. If you are planning to use this dataset, we encourage you to cite it using its canonical reference as “Citations with identifiers in Wikipedia” (hosted on FigShare).
This data release is only a first step among many to come in understanding how citations are used on Wikipedia. In the next few months, we’ll focus on additional analyses of citations in Wikimedia projects, to understand how they are accessed by readers, since we care about the public being able to verify information that Wikipedia cites. We’ll also continue to work with partners to promote the use of this data and deepen our research of citation practices on Wikipedia.
As Wikipedia becomes every more ingrained in the fabric of the world’s knowledge–as a resource that aims to provide fact-based, neutral information that people can trust–we need to understand and cultivate our citation culture and make sure we can constantly vet it for biases, gaps and omissions.
Miriam Redi, Research Scientist
Dario Taraborelli, Director, Head of Research
Jake Orlowitz, The Wikipedia Library
Ben Vershbow, Lead Programs Manager (libraries, education, cultural heritage)
Wikimedia Foundation
You can also read this post on our Medium publication. The graphs in this post are by Miriam Redi/Wikimedia Foundation, and freely licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Related Posts
Archive notice: This is an archived post from blog.wikimedia.org, which operated under different editorial and content guidelines than Diff.
FAQs
What is the most cited source? ›
| Rank | Citations | Journal |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 305,148 | J. Biol. Chem. |
| 2 | 213,005 | Nature |
| 3 | 155,530 | Anal. Biochem. |
| 4 | 65,335 | Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA |
A Wikipedia citation usually includes the title of the article, “Wikipedia” and/or “Wikimedia Foundation,” the date the article was last updated, and the URL. In APA Style, you'll give the URL of the current revision of the article so that you're sure the reader accesses the same version as you.
How many sources do you need for Wikipedia? ›Wikipedia guidelines say that sources need to be secondary. It also means that there is no set number of sources required, although generally people have determined that “multiple” sources are needed. How many are multiple? Well, more than one and less than infinity.
Do you have to cite Wikipedia as a source? ›Citation is not needed for fact-checking general knowledge. Some details, such as the population of Canada, can be found on Wikipedia, but it is best to verify the information using an authoritative source such as the CIA World Factbook.
How do you cite sources? ›- For books: author, title, place of publication, publisher, and publication year.
- For articles: author, title of article, title of journal, volume, issue, date, page numbers, and doi or permalink.
- For web page resources: author, title of page, Web address or URL, and date of access.
The most-cited paper in history is a paper by Oliver Lowry describing an assay to measure the concentration of proteins.
Who are the top ten cited researchers on Google Scholar? ›| RANK | NAME | CITATIONS |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ronald C Kessler | 466308 |
| 2 | JoAnn E Manson | 383680 |
| 3 | Robert Langer | 359953 |
| 4 | Graham Colditz | 349617 |
Hot & Highly Cited Papers
Highly Cited Papers are papers that perform in the top 1% based on the number of citations received when compared to other papers published in the same field in the same year.
The online encyclopedia does not consider itself to be reliable as a source and discourages readers from using it in academic or research settings. Researchers, teachers, journalists, and public officials do not regard Wikipedia as a reliable source.
How do I cite Wikipedia in-text? ›When citing Wikipedia in-text, all you need is the article title. This is because Wikipedia is a collaborative website and there is no author or published date. The citation, which will be in parentheses, will have the title of the page or article in quotations.
How do you cite images from Wikipedia? ›
Presently, images displayed in Wikipedia articles are, as a practice, not cited in the article itself. Captions are optional, but should cover the image's subject matter when included, and may sometimes include further information about the author, title, date, or source.
What is source code Wikipedia? ›Source code (also referred to as source or code) is the version of software as it is originally written (i.e., typed into a computer) by a human in plain text (i.e., human readable alphanumeric characters).
How many Wikipedia pages are there? ›Can I make a Wikipedia page about myself? You can, but you shouldn't. Wikipedia rules say that you should not create your own Wikipedia page. Doing so would be a conflict of interest.
Why can't we cite Wikipedia? ›Even back in 2006, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales told students not to cite it for class projects or serious research. So why should you not use Wikipedia: Wikipedia is not considered scholarly. Wikipedia acknowledges that its information is not properly vetted.
What is the best use of Wikipedia for a research project? ›One of the greatest uses of Wikipedia for your academic research is using it to get a quick overview of your subject. It is an encyclopedia after all. This is particularly useful if you are researching a subject with which you are not familiar.
What are different types of sources? ›- Scholarly publications (Journals)
- Popular sources (News and Magazines)
- Professional/Trade sources.
- Books / Book Chapters.
- Conference proceedings.
- Government Documents.
- Theses & Dissertations.
- Direct Quoting: Using the author's exact wording from their research. ...
- Paraphrasing: Using your own words to describe another researcher's idea.
- Summarizing: A condensed description of the main / key ideas from another researcher's work.
When using APA format, follow the author-date method of in-text citation. This means that the author's last name and the year of publication for the source should appear in the text, for example, (Jones, 1998), and a complete reference should appear in the reference list at the end of the paper.
Is an h-index of 8 good? ›H-index scores between 3 and 5 seem common for new assistant professors, scores between 8 and 12 fairly standard for promotion to the position of tenured associate professor, and scores between 15 and 20 about right for becoming a full professor.
What is considered a highly cited researcher? ›
Citation Ranking
This prestigious list recognizes the world's top researchers whose citation records ranked in the top 1 % in their field in the Web of Science database. Being on the Highly Cited Researchers List means you are an influential and successful researcher – what an honor.
Using your Google Scholar Citations account, you can see the citation counts for your publications and have GS calculate your h-index. (You can also search Google Scholar by author name and the title of an article to retrieve citation information for a specific article.)
How do I find most cited authors on Google Scholar? ›Clicking on "Cited by ..." will bring up a list of citing documents in Google Scholar. These are arranged with the most highly cited works at the top.
What is a good number of Google Scholar citations? ›For all researchers, 5-10 citations of their papers will be great! Publishing in good journals help the citations of our articles.
How do I find the most cited authors in a field? ›...
To view the authors of both Highly Cited and Hot Papers, simply:
- Start a Topic Search.
- Refine your results by Hot or Highly Cited Papers (located on the left-hand side)
- Analyze results by author (Find out more about this here).
Highly appropriate: peer-reviewed journal articles
In general, you should primarily cite peer-reviewed journal articles in your research papers.
What are Hot Papers? Hot papers are papers that receive citations soon after publication relative to other papers of the same field and age.
What is a well cited article? ›Overall, the three most important characteristics of highly cited articles were the number of views (more is clearly better), the number of characters (more is better) and an adherence to the seven- to 13-word range in the title length. The above, of course, does not guarantee increased citation rates.
Can I use Wikipedia for a research paper? ›The answer from Wikipedia is clear: at least in research projects, “you probably shouldn't be citing Wikipedia”. Why's that? Well, Wikipedia, like other encyclopedias and handbooks, is a tertiary source. Tertiary sources are those that take their information from other primary and secondary sources.
How do you in text cite Wikipedia? ›When citing Wikipedia in-text, all you need is the article title. This is because Wikipedia is a collaborative website and there is no author or published date. The citation, which will be in parentheses, will have the title of the page or article in quotations.
Is Wikipedia a scholarly source? ›
Wikipedia is not considered scholarly. Wikipedia acknowledges that its information is not properly vetted. The site has included hoaxes. People have created and edited pages to drive traffic to other websites.
Can you cite Britannica? ›How to cite GENERAL ENCYCLOPEDIAs. Major reference books (major dictionaries and encyclopedias, i.e. World Book) can be cited with a note in text rather than in a reference. 1. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th ed., s.v. "salvation."
Why Wikipedia is a reliable source? ›Wikipedia entries are generally in the forefront of any web research and can be great sources to get preliminary information on a topic and find reliable sources through their notes, references, external links and further reading sections.
Is Wikipedia a reliable source of information? ›The online encyclopedia does not consider itself to be reliable as a source and discourages readers from using it in academic or research settings. Researchers, teachers, journalists, and public officials do not regard Wikipedia as a reliable source.
How accurate is Wikipedia? ›So is Wikipedia a credible source? Many of the entries are well-documented, checked for quality and — as opposed to reference books — often completely up-to-date, but, 20 years after its creation, the online encyclopedia is not 100% reliable, because information can be manipulated, and sometimes almost undetectably.
How do you cite images from Wikipedia? ›Presently, images displayed in Wikipedia articles are, as a practice, not cited in the article itself. Captions are optional, but should cover the image's subject matter when included, and may sometimes include further information about the author, title, date, or source.
How do u cite a website? ›Author last name, First name. “Page Title.” Website Name. Month Day, Year. URL.
How do you cite a website in text citation? ›Luckily, writing the in-text citation for a website or webpage is easy: Simply include the author and year of publication. The URL goes in the corresponding reference list entry (and yes, you can leave the links live).
What is the most reliable source of information? ›Primary sources are often considered the most credible in terms of providing evidence for your argument, as they give you direct evidence of what you are researching.
What is source code Wikipedia? ›Source code (also referred to as source or code) is the version of software as it is originally written (i.e., typed into a computer) by a human in plain text (i.e., human readable alphanumeric characters).
What are reliable sources? ›
A reliable source is one that provides a thorough, well-reasoned theory, argument, discussion, etc. based on strong evidence. Scholarly, peer-reviewed articles or books -written by researchers for students and researchers. Original research, extensive bibliography.
Is Britannica better than Wikipedia? ›Encyclopedia Britannica Online
Yes, Britannica is a reliable source, and is certainly more reliable than Wikipedia.
Scientists rate the completeness of articles at 83.8±1.5%. However, completeness had a huge variation, ranging between 68.0% and 91.0%. This difference shows that Wikipedia is not always the best resource to draw complete information from, but it always provides over two thirds of the whole story.
Why did Encyclopedia Britannica fail? ›This narrative stresses that Britannica's management faced organizational diseconomies of scope between supporting lines of business in the old and new markets, which generated internal conflicts. These conflicts hindered the commercialization of new technology and hastened its decline.