28 August 2009

And the most cited journal of Wikipedia is...

...the Journal of Biological Chemistry (cited 22227 times), followed by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (14628), Nature (11127), Genome Research (10208) and Science (5803).[a][1]

Some context and history

A while ago, I got the idea of building a compilation of all the journals cited by Wikipedia based on the "|journal=" parameters found in citation templates,[b] and organized them alphabetically and by popularity.[2] This would help to identify the most popular journals that didn't have an article on Wikipedia, potential redirects (for example Phys. Rev. Lett. and Physical Review Letters are the same journals, so someone searching for the former should be automatically be taken to the later).

This allowed us (WikiProject Academic Journals) to create redirects and new articles for a bunch of journals. Before the compilation was built, the most-cited "journal" (see note [a]) without an article (or redirect) was cited 10190 times (Genome Res. which was redirected to Genome Research).[3] After a bit more than two months, the most-cited journal without an article was cited 328 times (Malacologia).[4,5] A pretty good improvement I would argue, although this was the "easy" part. It mostly involved creating redirects rather than entirely new articles, and there is also the fact that highly-cited journals are rarer than the not-so-highly-cited journals. A reasonable goal for the next months would be to push the threshold down to 150.

Wish us luck.

Notes

[a] Some caution about these numbers. These are the number of times for a particular spelling used in the "|journal=" parameter. For example the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences can be written Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. (14628), Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (393), Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (378), Proc Natl Acad Sci USA (350), PNAS (302), Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. (151), Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A (121), and so on. These also exclude references that are "manually formatted", which form a significant portion of citations on Wikipedia, and I would not be surprised if they formed a vast majority. For more details, see Journals cited by Wikipedia: Reading the data.
[b] Wikipedia articles can be referenced in many ways. Usually it simply involves writing placing something like
[ref]Author (Date). "Title", ''Journal'', '''Volume''' (issue): pages.[/ref]"
after the sentence in need of a reference. However, it can be annoying to remember the exact way to format a reference. To facilitate this, reference templates can be used instead; these will automatically make your references pretty. What you instead add after the sentence is something like this:
{{cite journal
|author=Jimmy Longpants
|year=2009
|title=I like pirates
|journal=Journal of Pirates
|volume=3 |issue=2 |pages=34-36
}}
which will display as
Jimmy Longpants (2009). "I like pirates", Journal of Pirates, 3(2): 34-36.
The bot retrieves all the "|journal=" parameters of all the citations templates used on all the articles of Wikipedia.

References

[1] ThaddeusB (28 August 2009) "Journals cited by Wikipedia (22 August 2009 dump)", Wikipedia:WikiProject Academic Journals. Consulted 28 August 2009.
[2] Headbomb (30 May 2009). "Journal Compilation", Wikipedia:Bot Requests. Consulted 28 August 2009.
[3] Wikipedia:WikiProject Academic Journals/Journals cited by Wikipedia/Missing1 (30 May 2009 dump). Consulted 28 August 2009.
[4] Wikipedia:WikiProject Academic Journals/Journals cited by Wikipedia/Missing1 (22 August 2009 dump). Consulted 28 August 2009.
[5] ThaddeusB (28 August 2009). "New Upload in Progress", Wikipedia:Wikiproject Academic Journal. Consulted 28 August 2009.

External links

WikiProject Academic Journals

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