Indeed, traditional journals are increasingly citing Wikipedia formally, and the general distrust of Wikipedia in academic circles is decreasing. There is evidently a feedback loop between Wikipedia and scholarly journals, which accelerates research. Wikipedia reflects the state of scientific knowledge but also shapes science ideas that are integrated into the encyclopedia are used more in scientific journals. Wikipedia, the multilingual encyclopedia, is the world’s largest and most visited online general reference website and, arguably, the largest collaborative project of humankind. For the top biomedical journal papers cited in Wikipedia's medical pages in 2016-2017, it took about 90 days (3 months) for the citation to be used in Wikipedia. The multidisciplinary journals Nature, Science, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences were among the top 10 journals with the highest Wikipedia medical article citations. The Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews was the most cited journal by Wikipedia, followed by The New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet. However, the importance of the Wikipedia article did not affect the speed of reference addition. The higher the importance of a Wikipedia article, the higher was the mean number of journal citations it contained (top article, 48.13 lowest article, 6.44 ). There was a large spike in the number of journal articles published in or after 2002 that were cited by Wikipedia.

From 11,325 Wikipedia medical articles, we identified citations to 137,889 journal articles from over 15,000 journals.

Highest impact factor journals