Quality of References Supporting Urologic Articles on Wikipedia
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Abstract
Background: Wikipedia is an easily available and commonly used source of medical information for patients and practitioners. Its editing guidelines state that information added to the site should be accompanied by in-line citations to reliable (preferably secondary) sources to meet the website’s standards for verifiability. We hypothesized that a large fraction of these citations would be to popular media and to scientific works of relatively low academic impact.
Objective: To characterize the works cited in the most frequently accessed Wikipedia articles on urologic diseases and interventions.
Methods: Of the 1500 most-viewed articles in the Medicine WikiProject, 24 were relevant to urology. From these 24, the top 10 most-viewed urology-related articles were selected for citation analysis. Sources in in-line citations, defined as “ref” elements with unique or absent “name” attributes, were categorized by publisher and assigned one of 6 publication types. These types were: original scientific research, systematic reviews, scholarly non-systematic reviews (including books, editorials, and guidelines), medical references directed at the lay person (e.g. WebMD), popular media, and other. Finally, citation counts were retrieved using the Scopus database for references with digital object identifiers (DOI) or PubMed identification numbers (PMID).
Results: The 24 articles included in the study were accessed by Wikipedia users an average of 2019 times per article per day (range 987-4,699) and contained an average of 40.5 citations (range 5-189). Of the 567 references cited in the 10 most viewed articles, 25.9% (147) were original research, 8.8% (50) were systematic reviews, 47.1% (267) were other scholarly reviews, 6.0% (34) were lay-directed medical resources, and only 7.9% (45) were popular media. 245 separate publishers were cited (208 scientific), of which the Journal of Urology was the most common (21 citations) followed by the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews (20). Of the 262 references with citation counts the Scopus database, 74.8% (196) were cited by at least 10 other scholarly articles. The median reference was cited by 26 other scientific articles (mean 151).
Conclusions: The vast majority of sources backing information in urologic articles on Wikipedia are scientific books and peer-reviewed journals targeted to a professional audience. The plurality of these are textbooks and reviews of the literature. The vast majority of scientific articles cited have achieved at least a moderate level of recognition within their field. These findings suggest that the Wikipedia editing process for these articles does favor sources of relatively high scientific quality. Further research is required to determine whether the relatively high quality and quantity of sources cited implies high quality of the Wikipedia articles themselves.
Objective: To characterize the works cited in the most frequently accessed Wikipedia articles on urologic diseases and interventions.
Methods: Of the 1500 most-viewed articles in the Medicine WikiProject, 24 were relevant to urology. From these 24, the top 10 most-viewed urology-related articles were selected for citation analysis. Sources in in-line citations, defined as “ref” elements with unique or absent “name” attributes, were categorized by publisher and assigned one of 6 publication types. These types were: original scientific research, systematic reviews, scholarly non-systematic reviews (including books, editorials, and guidelines), medical references directed at the lay person (e.g. WebMD), popular media, and other. Finally, citation counts were retrieved using the Scopus database for references with digital object identifiers (DOI) or PubMed identification numbers (PMID).
Results: The 24 articles included in the study were accessed by Wikipedia users an average of 2019 times per article per day (range 987-4,699) and contained an average of 40.5 citations (range 5-189). Of the 567 references cited in the 10 most viewed articles, 25.9% (147) were original research, 8.8% (50) were systematic reviews, 47.1% (267) were other scholarly reviews, 6.0% (34) were lay-directed medical resources, and only 7.9% (45) were popular media. 245 separate publishers were cited (208 scientific), of which the Journal of Urology was the most common (21 citations) followed by the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews (20). Of the 262 references with citation counts the Scopus database, 74.8% (196) were cited by at least 10 other scholarly articles. The median reference was cited by 26 other scientific articles (mean 151).
Conclusions: The vast majority of sources backing information in urologic articles on Wikipedia are scientific books and peer-reviewed journals targeted to a professional audience. The plurality of these are textbooks and reviews of the literature. The vast majority of scientific articles cited have achieved at least a moderate level of recognition within their field. These findings suggest that the Wikipedia editing process for these articles does favor sources of relatively high scientific quality. Further research is required to determine whether the relatively high quality and quantity of sources cited implies high quality of the Wikipedia articles themselves.
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