The Altmetric Annual Research Grant Has Been Awarded: How Do Scholarly Citations in Wikipedia Appear?

It’s that time of year again! Altmetric announce the lucky winner of their annual research grant!

Launched in 2016, the Altmetric Annual Research Grant awards up to £1,500 to support a project in the altmetrics space, with the aim of facilitating research that would not otherwise be possible.

This year’s prize has been awarded to Dr Evan Goldstein, Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Geological Sciences at the The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, for his project titled, “How do scholarly citations in Wikipedia appear?”.

Dr Goldstein’s project, scheduled to begin in July 2017, will explore the questions of ‘how’, ‘when’ and ‘why’ scholarly mentions appear on Wikipedia, with the aim of determining what proportion of Wikipedia mentions for a single journal are author-generated.

Speaking about the grant, Dr Goldstein said,

“Wikipedia is one of the largest websites in terms of global web traffic, and represents a massive opportunity for researchers to provide long lasting outreach and engagement with non-academic audiences. Support from Altmetric will allow my research into this valuable tool to reach a broad audience via open access publication.”

Altmetric’s Director of Research & Education Stacy Konkiel commented,

“We are pleased to support Dr Goldstein’s proposed research, which will add to the growing body of knowledge on how Wikipedia spreads and accelerates scholarship

Updates on progress of the project will be posted on the Altmetric blog, and all results of the research will be made openly available at the end of the project.