ArticleBMJ (Clinical research ed.)2014
References that anyone can edit: review of Wikipedia citations in peer reviewed health science literature.
Article in BMJ (Clinical research ed.), 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Cross-border collaboration, communication, and research frontiers on biologics in chronic rhinosinusitis from 2004 to 2023.Frontiers in big data · 2024Pooled it
- Research citations building trust in Wikipedia: Results from a survey of published authors.PloS one · 2025Article
- Science through Wikipedia: A novel representation of open knowledge through co-citation networks.PloS one · 2020Article
- Situating Wikipedia as a health information resource in various contexts: A scoping review.PloS one · 2020Article
- Mapping the literature of hospital pharmacy.Journal of the Medical Library Association : JMLA · 2016Article
- Is There a Weekly Pattern for Health Searches on Wikipedia and Is the Pattern Unique to Health Topics?Journal of medical Internet research · 2015Article
- Preserving the Integrity of Citations and References by All Stakeholders of Science Communication.Journal of Korean medical science · 2015Review
- Wikipedia and medicine: quantifying readership, editors, and the significance of natural language.Journal of medical Internet research · 2015Article
- Modern medicine comes online: How putting Wikipedia articles through a medical journal's traditional process can put free, reliable information into as many hands as possible.Open medicine : a peer-reviewed, independent, open-access journal · 2014Article
- Mining consumer health vocabulary from community-generated text.AMIA ... Annual Symposium proceedings. AMIA Symposium · 2014Article
Corrections and comments
- Commented on by
Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
objectivesTo examine indexed health science journals to evaluate the prevalence of Wikipedia citations, identify the journals that publish articles with Wikipedia citations, and determine how Wikipedia is being cited.
designBibliometric analysis. STUDY SELECTION: Publications in the English language that included citations to Wikipedia were retrieved using the online databases Scopus and Web of Science. DATA SOURCES: To identify health science journals, results were refined using Ulrich's database, selecting for citations from journals indexed in Medline, PubMed, or Embase. Using Thomson Reuters Journal Citation Reports, 2011 impact factors were collected for all journals included in the search. DATA EXTRACTION: Resulting citations were thematically coded, and descriptive statistics were calculated.
results1433 full text articles from 1008 journals indexed in Medline, PubMed, or Embase with 2049 Wikipedia citations were accessed. The frequency of Wikipedia citations has increased over time; most citations occurred after December 2010. More than half of the citations were coded as definitions (n = 648; 31.6%) or descriptions (n=482; 23.5%). Citations were not limited to journals with a low or no impact factor; the search found Wikipedia citations in many journals with high impact factors.
conclusionsMany publications are citing information from a tertiary source that can be edited by anyone, although permanent, evidence based sources are available. We encourage journal editors and reviewers to use caution when publishing articles that cite Wikipedia.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.