Academia's recognition of Wikipedia

Dear Sir, In their opinion paper primarily based on literature review, Jemielniak and Aibar (2016) presented the perceptions and reservations towards Wikipedia in academia, addressing the common questions about overall reliability of Wikipedia entries and so on. The literature reviewed are also opinion-, perception-, and surveybased articles. The paper ended with an appeal to the academia to start openly and actively collaborating with Wikipedia. Evidently, there hasn’t been any study that has looked at citations received by Wikipedia in journal articles. So, a quick check in the two citation databases, Scopus and the Web of Science (WoS), was done for the period 2001 to 2014. The Scopus figures are based on the “reference search” feature of the database that gives all such references that have a mention of Wikipedia and the WoS figures are based on the “cited reference search” in which Wikipedia is identified as a “group author” (Table 1). Wikipedia came into being in 2001. Both Scopus and the WoS reveal that in the very first year, Wikipedia received one citation each in journals. Thereafter, both the databases reflect increased citation counts over a period of time. There are variations in Scopus and WoS figures primarily owing to their respective coverage and indexing methods. But the indicative search makes it clear that academia’s reliance on Wikipedia is increasing. That being the case, it seems that academia may take to contributing and collaborating with Wikipedia, sooner rather than later. G. Mahesh CSIR-National Institute of Science Communication and Information Resources, 14-Satang Vihar Marg, New Delhi 110067, India E-mail: gmahesh@niscair.res.in