Abstract:
Assessing references in the review process of academic research is a common requirement. One
of the criteria in the credibility of the works is to support arguments with solid and peer-reviewed
resources from the literature. Having non peer-reviewed resources in the references can degrade
the work and this may be a reason for rejection or retraction, later. Recently, works taking such
resources as reference appear more often with increasing number of blogs and Wikipedia usage;
hence, the motivation of this study is to investigate given credit to such works. As the case study,
investigation is done in the huge online database of ScienceDirect. Queries to extract number of
works housing such references are run per research fields classified in the database. The results
show there are considerable number of examples where blogs and Wikipedia are seen as resources
to be used in academic papers. This finding is limited to the case study and it is too early to
declare that blogs and Wikipedia can be used as references; however, a de facto adoption exits in
some research fields.