A comparative study of academic and Wikipedia ranking

Abstract

In addition to its broad popularity Wikipedia is also widely used for scholarly purposes. Many Wikipedia pages pertain to academic papers, scholars and topics providing a rich ecology for scholarly uses. Scholarly references and mentions on Wikipedia may thus shape the "societal impact" of a certain scholarly communication item, but it is not clear whether they shape actual "academic impact". In this paper we compare the impact of papers, scholars, and topics according to two different measures, namely scholarly citations and Wikipedia mentions. Our results show that academic and Wikipedia impact are positively correlated. Papers, authors, and topics that are mentioned on Wikipedia have higher academic impact than those are not mentioned. Our findings validate the hypothesis that Wikipedia can help assess the impact of scholarly publications and underpin relevance indicators for scholarly retrieval or recommendation systems.