Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Jun 29, 2018
Open Peer Review Period: Jun 30, 2018 - Jul 25, 2018
Date Accepted: Aug 22, 2018
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
The most influential medical journals, according to Wikipedia: how quickly does new medical research propagate in a non-academic encyclopedia
ABSTRACT
Background:
Wikipedia, the multilingual encyclopedia, was founded in 2001 and is the world’s largest and most visited online general reference work. Wikipedia is widely used by healthcare professionals and students.
Objective:
The inclusion of journal articles into Wikipedia is of scholarly interest yet it is unclear how long it takes for a journal article to be included, from the moment of its publication to its incorporation into Wikipedia. Our objective is to study this phenomenon, as well as discover what journals are most often cited in medical articles on Wikipedia.
Methods:
We evaluated the number of days between journal article publication and its citation in the English language Wikipedia medical articles, up to October 2017, treating it as a proxy for information diffusion rate. We retrieved the dates of article inclusion on Wikipedia, as well as the date of journal publication from Crossref.
Results:
We found citations to 137,889 journal articles from over 15,000 journals, in 11,325 Wikipedia medical articles. There was a big spike in the number of journal articles published in or after 2002 that were cited by Wikipedia. The higher the importance of a Wikipedia article, the more mean (standard deviation -SD) journal citations on average it contained. However the importance of the Wikipedia article did not affect the speed of reference addition. The Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, The New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet were the most cited journals by Wikipedia, in that order. The multidisciplinary journals Nature, Science and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences were within the top ten journals by Wikipedia medical article citation. On average it now takes 100 days (three months) for a journal article published in a top biomedical journal to be cited in Wikipedia.
Conclusions:
We found evidence of recentisim, whereby recently published journal articles are preferentially cited in Wikipedia. Traditional high impact medical and multidisciplinary journals were highly cited by Wikipedia suggesting that Wikipedia medical articles have robust underpinnings. In keeping with the Wikipedia policy of citing reviews/secondary sources in preference to primary sources, the The Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews was the most referenced journal.
Citation
Per the author's request the PDF is not available.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.