A comparison of title words for journal articles and Wikipedia pages: Coverage and stylistic differences?

Abstract

This article assesses whether there are gaps in Wikipedia’s coverage of academic information and whether there are non-obvious stylistic differences from academic journal articles that Wikipedia users and editors should be aware of. For this, it analyses terms in the titles of journal articles that are absent from all English Wikipedia page titles for each of 27 Scopus subject categories. The results show that English Wikipedia has lower coverage of issues of interest to non-English nations and there are gaps probably caused by a lack of willing subject specialist editors in some areas. There were also stylistic disciplinary differences in the results, with some fields using synonyms of “analysing” that were ignored in Wikipedia, and others using the present tense in titles to emphasise research outcomes. Since Wikipedia is broadly effective at covering academic research topics from all disciplines, it might be relied upon by non-specialists. Specialists should therefore check for coverage gaps within their areas for useful topics and librarians should caution users that important topics may be missing.