Psychology and Wikipedia: Measuring journals' impact by Wikipedia citations

Journal ranking is widely used in academic circles to evaluate an academic journal's impact and quality. Journal rankings are intended to reflect the place of a journal within its field, the relative difficulty of being published in that journal, and the prestige associated with it. They have been introduced as official research evaluation tools in several countries, such as Impact factor, h-index, or altmetric.

Now, researchers have analyzed academic journals used in Wikipedia articles about psychology, comparing the results to the existing established measures, such as the SciMago journal rank (SJR), and interpreting the results and conclusions for psychology as a field. The study aimed to explore the impact of peer-reviewed psychology journals on Wikipedia articles.

In the article published in Social Science Computer Review they compare the list to journals that are considered most prestigious according to the SciMago journal rank score and describe the time trajectories of the knowledge transfer from the moment of the publication of an article to its citation in Wikipedia. "Finally, we propose that the citation rate on Wikipedia, next to the traditional citation index, maybe a good indicator of the work's impact in the field of psychology," said principal researcher Dariusz Jemielniak.

Full text available on ResearchGate.