Abstract
Rapid developments and methodological divides hinder the study of how scientific knowledge accumulates, consolidates and transfers to the public sphere. Our work proposes using Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, as a historiographical source for contemporary science. We chose the high-profile field of gene editing as our test case, performing a historical analysis of the English-language Wikipedia articles on CRISPR. Using a mixed-method approach, we qualitatively and quantitatively analyzed the CRISPR article’s text, sections and references, alongside 50 affiliated articles. These, we found, documented the CRISPR field’s maturation from a fundamental scientific discovery to a biotechnological revolution with vast social and cultural implications. We developed automated tools to support such research and demonstrated its applicability to two other scientific fields–coronavirus and circadian clocks. Our method utilizes Wikipedia as a digital and free archive, showing it can document the incremental growth of knowledge and the manner scientific research accumulates and translates into public discourse. Using Wikipedia in this manner compliments and overcomes some issues with contemporary histories and can also augment existing bibliometric research.
Original language | English |
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Article number | e0290827 |
Journal | PLoS ONE |
Volume | 18 |
Issue number | 9 SEPTEMBER |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Sep 2023 |
Externally published | Yes |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2023 Benjakob et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Funding
Thanks to the Bettencourt Schueller Foundation long term partnership, this work was partly supported by the LPI Research Fellowship, Université de Paris, INSERM U1284, to RAv and OB. RAv’s work was supported in part at the Technion by a fellowship of "The Israel Academy of Science and Humanities”. In either case, the funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. We want to thank Dusan Misevic, Bastian Greshake Tzovaras, Marc Santolini, Mad Price Ball, Alex Webb, Gal Manella and all those who provided feedback.
Funders | Funder number |
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Institut national de la santé et de la recherche médicale | U1284 |
Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities | |
Technion-Israel Institute of Technology | |
Fondation Bettencourt Schueller |