Some statistics on scholarly data in Wikidata

Posted on May 25, 2017 Updated on May 26, 2017

The Wikicite initiative have spawned a lot of work on bibliographic/source information in Wikidata. Particularly scholarly bibliographic information has been added to Wikidata. Recently James Hare announced that we have over 3 million citations recorded in Wikidata, – mostly due to automated additions made by Hare himself.

With the tools of Magnus Manske and James Hare that are presently central to the growth of scholarly bibliographic data on Wikidata, we do not get a direct link to the authors items of Wikidata. Such information presently needs to be added manually or in a semi-automated fashion. Sponsor/funding information is neither added automatically, – except for a US organization where James Hare added this information.

So how much data do we have in Wikidata when we ask if the data is linked to other Wikidata items? Below are a few queries to the Wikidata Query Service that attempt to answer some aspects of this question.

Scientific articles

How many items do we have in Wikidata that describe a scientific article and that is linked to an author item?

SELECT (COUNT(DISTINCT ?work) AS ?count)
WHERE {
  ?work wdt:P31 wd:Q13442814 .
  ?work wdt:P50 ?author .
}

The query returns 45’253.

How many scientific articles with one or more author items and no author name string (indicating that the author linking may be complete).

SELECT (COUNT(DISTINCT ?work) AS ?count)
WHERE {
  ?work wdt:P31 wd:Q13442814 .
  ?work wdt:P50 ?author .
  FILTER NOT EXISTS { ?work wdt:P2093 ?authorname }
}

This query gives 3’567.

How many items do we have in Wikidata that is claimed to be a scientific article?

SELECT (COUNT(DISTINCT ?work) AS ?count)
WHERE {
  ?work wdt:P31 wd:Q13442814 .
}

This query gives 677’630.

Scientific authors

How many authors are in Wikidata that have written a scientific article?

SELECT (COUNT(DISTINCT ?author) AS ?count)
WHERE {
  ?work wdt:P31 wd:Q13442814 .
  ?work wdt:P50 ?author .
}

The query returns 10’193.

How many authors are in Wikidata that have written a scientific article and where the gender is indicated?

SELECT (COUNT(DISTINCT ?author) AS ?count)
WHERE {
  ?work wdt:P31 wd:Q13442814 .
  ?work wdt:P50 ?author .
  ?author wdt:P21 ?gender .
}

This query gives 8’853.

How many authors are there in Wikidata that have written a scientific article and where the scientific article is recorded having made one or more citations.

SELECT (COUNT(DISTINCT ?author) AS ?count)
WHERE {
  ?work wdt:P31 wd:Q13442814 .
  ?work wdt:P50 ?author .
  ?work wdt:P2860 ?cited_work .
}

This query returns 6’586.

How many authors are there in Wikidata that have written a scientific article and where the scientific article is recorded having made one or more citations and the cited work is recorded with one or more author items.

SELECT (COUNT(DISTINCT ?author) AS ?count)
WHERE {
  ?work wdt:P31 wd:Q13442814 .
  ?work wdt:P50 ?author .
  ?work wdt:P2860 ?cited_work .
  ?cited_work wdt:P50 ?cited_author .
}

This query returns 5’614.

How many authors are there in Wikidata that have written a scientific article and where the scientific article is recorded having made one or more citations and the cited work is recorded with one or more author items and where the genders of both the citing and the cited author are known.

SELECT (COUNT(DISTINCT ?author) AS ?count)
WHERE {
  ?work wdt:P31 wd:Q13442814 .
  ?work wdt:P50 ?author .
  ?work wdt:P2860 ?cited_work .
  ?cited_work wdt:P50 ?cited_author .
  ?author wdt:P21 ?gender .
  ?cited_author wdt:P21 ?cited_gender .
}

This query gives 4,730.

How many authors are there in Wikidata that have written a scientific article and where the scientific article is recorded having made one or more citations and the cited work is recorded with one or more author items and where the genders of both the citing and the cited author are known and where there is no author name string in neither the work nor the cited work (indicating that the work and the cited work may be completely linked with respect to author name.

SELECT (COUNT(DISTINCT ?author) AS ?count)
WHERE {
  ?work wdt:P31 wd:Q13442814 .
  ?work wdt:P50 ?author .
  ?work wdt:P2860 ?cited_work .
  ?cited_work wdt:P50 ?cited_author .
  ?author wdt:P21 ?gender .
  ?cited_author wdt:P21 ?cited_gender .
  FILTER NOT EXISTS { ?work wdt:P2093 ?authorname }
  FILTER NOT EXISTS { ?cited_work wdt:P2093 ?cited_authorname }
}

This query gives only 551.

Sponsor/funders

Sponsors of scientific articles ordered by number of citations.

SELECT ?number_of_citations ?sponsorLabel
WITH {
  SELECT (COUNT(?citing_work) AS ?number_of_citations) ?sponsor
  WHERE {
    ?work wdt:P859 ?sponsor .
    ?work wdt:P31 wd:Q13442814 .
    ?citing_work wdt:P2860 ?work .
  }
  GROUP BY ?sponsor
} AS %result
WHERE {
  INCLUDE %result
  SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "en". }
}
ORDER BY DESC(?number_of_citations)
LIMIT 5

This query gives National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, Lundbeck Foundation, The Danish Council for Strategic Research, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, University of Wisconsin–Madison.