De facto adoption of blog and wikipedia in research reporting

Abstract

Assessing references in the review process of academic research is a common requirement. One of the criteria in the credibility of the works is to support arguments with solid and peer-reviewed resources from the literature. Having non peer-reviewed resources in the references can degrade the work and this may be a reason for rejection or retraction, later. Recently, works taking such resources as reference appear more often with increasing number of blogs and Wikipedia usage; hence, the motivation of this study is to investigate given credit to such works. As the case study, investigation is done in the huge online database of ScienceDirect. Queries to extract number of works housing such references are run per research fields classified in the database. The results show there are considerable number of examples where blogs and Wikipedia are seen as resources to be used in academic papers. This finding is limited to the case study and it is too early to declare that blogs and Wikipedia can be used as references; however, a de facto adoption exits in some research fields.