The most-cited scholarly articles in Wikipedia were about science, particularly about genes. Most of these scholarly articles were cited more in Wikipedia than in scientific literature.
Matt Miller, a data scientist and librarian based in New York City, analyzed the citation data released by Wikimedia Foundation in March 2018. The data set, which has 15.7 million records, shows how many times sources with formal identifiers such as international standard book numbers (ISBNs) and digital object identifiers (DOIs) were cited. Miller looked at the English publications with DOIs, the most widely used identifier for scholarly articles and came up with a subset of 1.2 million citations, citing over 835,000 unique articles.
The most-cited paper is about the generation and initial analysis of full-length human and mouse cDNA sequences published in 2002. This particular paper was cited 4,702 times in English Wikipedia. The other 5 scholarly articles in the top 10 list were also about genetics.
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