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

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.