Obscure statistics on academic citations of Wikipedia Section Expert opinion subsection Academia has a table listing the number of Wikipedia citations in Elsevier s ScienceDirect database I think this is a very good way of showing the growing acceptance of Wikipedia by academics but there are two problems First of all the link to the search results footnote is broken Second it s not clear to me at all how using which search parameters the numbers were obtained I tried to reproduce the search results using the search string wikipedia org wiki For the year 2009 for example I get 533 hits if I search just the References sections of articles and I get 820 hits if I search the whole articles I didn t manage to get the 614 hits that are listed in the table for 2009 When the table is remade all search parameters search string search parts of articles etc should be stated in the footnote otherwise it will remain mysterious how the numbers were obtained