The distorted mirror of Wikipedia: a quantitative analysis of Wikipedia coverage of academics

Activity of modern scholarship creates online footprints galore. Along with traditional metrics of research quality, such as citation counts, online images of researchers and institutions increasingly matter in evaluating academic impact, decisions about grant allocation, and promotion. We examined 400 biographical Wikipedia articles on academics from four scientific fields to test if being featured in the world's largest online encyclopedia is correlated with higher academic notability (assessed through citation counts). We found no statistically significant correlation between Wikipedia articles metrics (length, number of edits, number of incoming links from other articles, etc.) and academic notability of the mentioned researchers. We also did not find any evidence that the scientists with better WP representation are necessarily more prominent in their fields. In addition, we inspected the Wikipedia coverage of notable scientists sampled from Thomson Reuters list of "highly cited researchers". In each of the examined fields, Wikipedia failed in covering notable scholars properly. Both findings imply that Wikipedia might be producing an inaccurate image of academics on the front end of science. By shedding light on how public perception of academic progress is formed, this study alerts that a subjective element might have been introduced into the hitherto structured system of academic evaluation.Comment: To appear in EPJ Data Science. To have the Additional Files and Datasets e-mail the corresponding autho

Highlighting Entanglement of Cultures via Ranking of Multilingual Wikipedia Articles

How different cultures evaluate a person? Is an important person in one culture is also important in the other culture? We address these questions via ranking of multilingual Wikipedia articles. With three ranking algorithms based on network structure of Wikipedia, we assign ranking to all articles in 9 multilingual editions of Wikipedia and investigate general ranking structure of PageRank, CheiRank and 2DRank. In particular, we focus on articles related to persons, identify top 30 persons for each rank among different editions and analyze distinctions of their distributions over activity fields such as politics, art, science, religion, sport for each edition. We find that local heroes are dominant but also global heroes exist and create an effective network representing entanglement of cultures. The Google matrix analysis of network of cultures shows signs of the Zipf law distribution. This approach allows to examine diversity and shared characteristics of knowledge organization between cultures. The developed computational, data driven approach highlights cultural interconnections in a new perspective.Comment: Published in PLoS ONE (http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0074554). Supporting information is available on the same webpag

Trust in the digital world - the return of the kings of old

Drawing principally on examples and literature from the Anglosphere, the author argues that the high salience given to "trust" and "trustworthiness" in recent scholarly literature, and which (notably in Putnam's work) attributes declining trust to a widely mistrusted mass media does not acknowledge the trustbuilding potential (realised in some instances) of interactive "Web 2.0" applications. Drawing on O'Neill's proposal that trust inheres in dialogue and mutual checking and verification, the author argues that "Web 2.0" media provide a variety of instances where the "dialogic" character of "Web 2.0" has established and enhanced trustworthiness. He argues normatively for a combination of "Web 2.0" interactivity and the adoption and implementation of self-regulatory codes in order to enhance the trustworthiness of the media

Effective Strategies for Increasing Citation Frequency

Due to the effect of citation impact on The Higher Education (THE) world university ranking system, most of the researchers are looking for some helpful techniques to increase their citation record. This paper by reviewing the relevant articles extracts 33 different ways for increasing the citations possibilities. The results show that the article visibility has tended to receive more download and citations. This is probably the first study to collect over 30 different ways to improve the citation record. Further study is needed to explore and expand these techniques in specific fields of study in order to make the results more precisely.Available online: http://ssrn.com/abstract=234458

Evaluating the retrieval effectiveness of Web search engines using a representative query sample

Search engine retrieval effectiveness studies are usually small-scale, using only limited query samples. Furthermore, queries are selected by the researchers. We address these issues by taking a random representative sample of 1,000 informational and 1,000 navigational queries from a major German search engine and comparing Google's and Bing's results based on this sample. Jurors were found through crowdsourcing, data was collected using specialised software, the Relevance Assessment Tool (RAT). We found that while Google outperforms Bing in both query types, the difference in the performance for informational queries was rather low. However, for navigational queries, Google found the correct answer in 95.3 per cent of cases whereas Bing only found the correct answer 76.6 per cent of the time. We conclude that search engine performance on navigational queries is of great importance, as users in this case can clearly identify queries that have returned correct results. So, performance on this query type may contribute to explaining user satisfaction with search engines

Trust in the Digital World The Return of the Kings of Old

Drawing principally on examples and literature from the Anglosphere, the author argues that the high salience given to "trust" and "trustworthiness" in recent scholarly literature, and which (notably in Putnam's work) attributes declining trust to a widely mistrusted mass media does not acknowledge the trustbuilding potential (realised in some instances) of interactive "Web 2.0" applications. Drawing on O'Neill's proposal that trust inheres in dialogue and mutual checking and verification, the author argues that "Web 2.0" media provide a variety of instances where the "dialogic" character of "Web 2.0" has established and enhanced trustworthiness. He argues normatively for a combination of "Web 2.0" interactivity and the adoption and implementation of selfregulatory codes in order to enhance the trustworthiness of the media.trust, mass media, Web 2.0, self-regulation, trustworthiness.

Exploring scholarly data with Rexplore.

Despite the large number and variety of tools and services available today for exploring scholarly data, current support is still very limited in the context of sensemaking tasks, which go beyond standard search and ranking of authors and publications, and focus instead on i) understanding the dynamics of research areas, ii) relating authors ‘semantically’ (e.g., in terms of common interests or shared academic trajectories), or iii) performing fine-grained academic expert search along multiple dimensions. To address this gap we have developed a novel tool, Rexplore, which integrates statistical analysis, semantic technologies, and visual analytics to provide effective support for exploring and making sense of scholarly data. Here, we describe the main innovative elements of the tool and we present the results from a task-centric empirical evaluation, which shows that Rexplore is highly effective at providing support for the aforementioned sensemaking tasks. In addition, these results are robust both with respect to the background of the users (i.e., expert analysts vs. ‘ordinary’ users) and also with respect to whether the tasks are selected by the evaluators or proposed by the users themselves

WikiM: Metapaths based Wikification of Scientific Abstracts

In order to disseminate the exponential extent of knowledge being produced in the form of scientific publications, it would be best to design mechanisms that connect it with already existing rich repository of concepts -- the Wikipedia. Not only does it make scientific reading simple and easy (by connecting the involved concepts used in the scientific articles to their Wikipedia explanations) but also improves the overall quality of the article. In this paper, we present a novel metapath based method, WikiM, to efficiently wikify scientific abstracts -- a topic that has been rarely investigated in the literature. One of the prime motivations for this work comes from the observation that, wikified abstracts of scientific documents help a reader to decide better, in comparison to the plain abstracts, whether (s)he would be interested to read the full article. We perform mention extraction mostly through traditional tf-idf measures coupled with a set of smart filters. The entity linking heavily leverages on the rich citation and author publication networks. Our observation is that various metapaths defined over these networks can significantly enhance the overall performance of the system. For mention extraction and entity linking, we outperform most of the competing state-of-the-art techniques by a large margin arriving at precision values of 72.42% and 73.8% respectively over a dataset from the ACL Anthology Network. In order to establish the robustness of our scheme, we wikify three other datasets and get precision values of 63.41%-94.03% and 67.67%-73.29% respectively for the mention extraction and the entity linking phase