@article{Li_Thelwall_Mohammadi_2021, title={How are encyclopedias cited in academic research? Wikipedia, Britannica, Baidu Baike, and Scholarpedia}, volume={30}, url={https://revista.profesionaldelainformacion.com/index.php/EPI/article/view/81073}, DOI={10.3145/epi.2021.sep.08}, abstractNote={<p class="p1">Encyclopedias are sometimes cited by scholarly publications, despite concerns about their credibility as sources for academic information. This study investigates trends from 2002 to 2020 in citing two crowdsourced and two expert-based encyclopedias to investigate whether they fit differently into the research landscape: <em>Wikipedia</em>, <em>Britannica</em>, <em>Baidu Baike</em>, and <em>Scholarpedia</em>. This is the first systematic comparison of the uptake of four major encyclopedias within academic research. <em>Scopus</em> searches were used to count the number of documents citing the four encyclopedias in each year. <em>Wikipedia</em> was by far the most cited encyclopedia, with up to 1% of <em>Scopus</em> documents citing it in Computer Science. Citations to <em>Wikipedia</em> increased exponentially until 2010, then slowed down and started to decrease. Both the <em>Britannica</em> and <em>Scholarpedia</em> citation rates were increasing in 2020, however. Disciplinary and national differences include <em>Britannica</em> being popular in Arts and Humanities, <em>Scholarpedia</em> in Neuroscience, and <em>Baidu Baike</em> in Chinese-speaking countries/territories. The results confirm that encyclopedias have minor value for academic research, often for background and definitions, with the most suitable one varying between fields and countries, and with the first evidence that the popularity of crowdsourced encyclopedias may be waning.</p>}, number={5}, journal={Profesional de la informaciĆ³n / Information Professional}, author={Li, Xuemei and Thelwall, Mike and Mohammadi, Ehsan}, year={2021}, month={sep.} }