Abstract
This paper analyzes Wikipedia's representation of the Nobel Prize
winning CRISPR/Cas9 technology, a method for gene editing. We
propose and evaluate different heuristics to match publications
from several publication corpora against Wikipedia's central
article on CRISPR and against the complete Wikipedia revision
history in order to retrieve further Wikipedia articles relevant
to the topic and to analyze Wikipedia's referencing patterns. We
explore to what extent the selection of referenced literature of
Wikipedia's central article on CRISPR adheres to scientific
standards and inner-scientific perspectives by assessing its
overlap with (1) the Web of Science (WoS) database, (2) a
WoS-based field-delineated corpus, (3) highly-cited publications
within this corpus, and (4) publications referenced by
field-specific reviews. We develop a diachronic perspective on
citation latency and compare the delays with which publications
are cited in relevant Wikipedia articles to the citation dynamics
of these publications over time. Our results confirm that a
combination of verbatim searches by title, DOI, and PMID is
sufficient and cannot be improved significantly by more elaborate
search heuristics. We show that Wikipedia references a
substantial amount of publications that are recognized by experts
and highly cited, but that Wikipedia also cites less visible
literature, and, to a certain degree, even not strictly
scientific literature. Delays in occurrence on Wikipedia compared
to the publication years show (most pronounced in case of the
central CRISPR article) a dependence on the dynamics of both the
field and the editor's reaction to it in terms of activity.
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