A diachronic perspective on citation latency in Wikipedia articles on CRISPR/Cas-9: an exploratory case study

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.

Keywords: Bibliometrics; CRISPR; Publication matching; Relevance; Timeliness; Wikipedia.

Fig. 1

Overview of the research setting. From the pilot study (a), we learn the effectiveness of our algorithms for fuzzy and verbatim matching. With study (b), we identify the 10 most relevant CRISPR articles in Wikipedia besides the central article. Study (c) then forms the actual main analysis, where we quantify when and how the papers of the field corpus are considered in Wikipedia

Fig. 2

Examples showcasing the verbatim and fuzzy heuristics; divergent data underlined

Fig. 3

Articles in the Wikipedia dump from June 2021 for which more than five publications from the bibliometric field delineation of 20,585 publications match the DOI or PMID over their entire revision history. The articles are sorted from top to bottom by descending number of maximum matched publications. The bars indicate the maximum number of publications for each month of their revision history

Fig. 4

Publication dates (x-axis) of matched publications in relation to the first occurrence on Wikipedia (y-axis) of the central CRISPR article

Fig. 5

Smoothed dynamics of the growth of text of the CRISPR Wikipedia article and its references

Fig. 6

Publication dates (x-axis) of matched publications in relation to the first occurrence (y-axis) of the selection of CRISPR-related articles

Fig. 7

Delays (in days) of occurrences in Wikipedia articles in relation to other articles within the set

Fig. 8

Matched publications’ yearly citation counts are plotted in relation to the date of first occurrence in the CRISPR article as baseline