| Wikipedia is a web encyclopedia project that everyone can participate in editing.Since its debut in 2001,Wikipedia has grown rapidly.The number of entries,editors involved,and people browsing the website have all increased rapidly.Wikipedia has developed into the most convenient source of information and knowledge for people.In recent years,there has been more and more research on Wikipedia in academia.At the same time,however,whether Wikipedia can become a reference source for academic papers has caused debate in the academic community.Some scholars actively promoted,while most scholars held a neutral attitude.And some scholars also firmly opposed using Wikipedia as a reference source in academic papers.Although the debate has not had a recognized result,the number of academic papers which citing Wikipedia has continued to grow.In this context,this paper attempts to study the academic papers which citing Wikipedia through bibliometrics and content analysis methods,and reveals the external characteristics and distribution rules of these papers by bibliometrics.The content analysis method is used to explore the internal characteristics and motivations of citing Wikipedia of highly cited papers.Some suggestions for scholars to cite Wikipedia will be provided through this study.This article uses the Scopus database as the data source,and uses the academic papers citing Wikipedia from 2003 to 2017 as the research object.After the study of the way of citing Wikipedia,the appropriate search strategies and search formulas were developed.This article uses 40,982 academic papers citing Wikipedia as a research data set.Bibliometrics was used to study the external characteristics and distribution rules of these papers,and the distribution of academic papers citing Wikipedia in time,subject,country/region,institution,author,and periodical was analyzed.The content analysis method was used to study the inernal motivation of citing Wikipedia.The highest cited 100 papers were selected as samples,and the motivations of citing Wikipedia were classified and the number of papers and proportions were counted.The results of this study show that the number of academic papers citing Wikipedia has grown rapidly over time,mainly in science and engineering disciplines.The papers citing Wikipedia do not have outstanding differences in the distribution of countries because of whether they are developed countries or not.However,judging from the proportion of the total number of papers,the top ranked countries are mostly less developed or developing countries.Institutions and authors who rank the top in the number of papers are highly influential.These papers do not only appear in journals with low impact.Many high-quality and high-impact academic journals also accept academic papers citing Wikipedia.The motivations of academic papers citing Wikipedia are mainly focused on the interpretation of nouns and recommending reading for readers,which account for more than 70%. |
PDF Full Text Request