Wikipedia citations: A comprehensive data set of citations with identifiers extracted from English Wikipedia

TLDR

Wikipedia’s content is built on reliable published sources, yet little is known about the specific sources it cites because extracting and identifying citations is difficult. The authors release the Wikipedia Citations dataset and accompanying code to enable the community to extend and update the resource. They extracted 29.3 million citations from 6.1 million English Wikipedia articles, classified them as books, journal articles, or web content, and identified 4.0 million scholarly citations with DOIs, PMCs, PMIDs, or ISBNs, adding 261 000 more DOIs via Crossref. The dataset shows that only 6.7 % of Wikipedia articles cite a journal article with a DOI, and Wikipedia cites merely 2 % of all Web of Science–indexed DOI articles.

Abstract

Abstract Wikipedia’s content is based on reliable and published sources. To this date, relatively little is known about what sources Wikipedia relies on, in part because extracting citations and identifying cited sources is challenging. To close this gap, we release Wikipedia Citations, a comprehensive data set of citations extracted from Wikipedia. We extracted29.3 million citations from 6.1 million English Wikipedia articles as of May 2020, and classified as being books, journal articles, or Web content. We were thus able to extract 4.0 million citations to scholarly publications with known identifiers—including DOI, PMC, PMID, and ISBN—and further equip an extra 261 thousand citations with DOIs from Crossref. As a result, we find that 6.7% of Wikipedia articles cite at least one journal article with an associated DOI, and that Wikipedia cites just 2% of all articles with a DOI currently indexed in the Web of Science. We release our code to allow the community to extend upon our work and update the data set in the future.