References that anyone can edit: review of Wikipedia citations in peer reviewed health science literature

摘要

We accessed a total of 1433 full text articles from 1008 journals indexed in Medline, PubMed, or Embase, with 2049 Wikipedia citations. The total number of Wikipedia citations has increased each year since 2004 except for between 2009 and 2010. The median impact factor of journals citing Wikipedia was 2.0 and has remained fairly consistent over time. Citations were not limited to journals with a low impact factor or no impact factor; our search found Wikipedia citations in many journals with a high impact factor. More than half of the citations were coded as definitions (n=648; 31.6%) or descriptions (n=482; 23.5%). We considered only 82 (4.0%) citations (from the categories Citations about Wikipedia and Wikipedia used in methods) to be appropriate uses of Wikipedia, as in these cases Wikipedia was the original source of information. Furthermore, we recovered 97 (4.8%) citations in which Wikipedia was cited in place of an original research study.