An analysis of Wikipedia references across PLOS publications

Introduction The free online encyclopedia Wikipedia is currently the fifth largest website with 18 billion page views and nearly 500 million unique visitors a month (Cohen, 2014). Scholars are increasingly challenging the primary mechanism for scholarly communication, namely publication of scholarly journal articles. And some have opened their eyes to the potential of the Wikipedia platform to address the commonly identified drawbacks of the publishing system such as long publication delays, an inflexible & static format, peer review biases, etc. (Black, 2008). Subsequently, the connections between Wikipedia and scholarly research are growing stronger: journal editors are enriching research publications by cross-linking to Wiki pages (Penev et al., 2008), editors are actively soliciting and coordinating Wikipedia contributions alongside journal article publications (Poulter, 2014), and the first Wikipedian-in-residence at an academic institution is working on expanding engagement in “public scholarship” (Brown, 2014). Furthermore, Wikipedia offers researchers dynamic content creation and management tools that can enable closer collaboration during the research process. These factors have all led to an increasing interest from academics to contribute scholarly research on Wikipedia.