Citation bias, diversity, and ethics

ABSTRACT

How often a researcher is cited usually plays a decisive role in that person’s career advancement, because academic institutions often use citation metrics, either explicitly or implicitly, to estimate research impact and productivity. Research has shown, however, that citation patterns and practices are affected by various biases, including the prestige of the authors being cited and their gender, race, and nationality, whether self-attested or perceived. Some commentators have proposed that researchers can address biases related to social identity or position by including a Citation Diversity Statement in a manuscript submitted for publication. A Citation Diversity Statement is a paragraph placed before the reference section of a manuscript in which the authors address the diversity and equitability of their references in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, or other factors and affirm a commitment to promoting equity and diversity in sources and references. The present commentary considers arguments in favor of Citation Diversity Statements, and some practical and ethical issues that these statements raise.

KEYWORDS:

• Citation
• bias
• diversity
• equity
• ethics

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank Andrea Naranjo Erazo, Elyssa Monzack, Kathryn Partin, Elise Smith and Ken Yamada for helpful comments. This research is supported, in part, by the Intramural Program of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), National Institutes of Health (NIH). It does not represent the views of the NIEHS, NIH, or US government.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Citation diversity statement

We are committed to promoting intellectual and social diversity in science and academic scholarship and took this commitment into consideration while researching and writing this article. We actively worked to promote diversity in our reference list while ensuring all the references cited were relevant and appropriate. We have included some references to enhance diversity but have not omitted any references for this purpose. To assess the diversity of our references, we obtained the predicted gender of the first and last author of each reference by using a database that stores the probability of a first name being carried by a woman (gender-api.com). Using this measure and removing self-citations, our references contain 30% woman(first)/woman(last), 11% man/woman, 15% woman/man, and 44% man/man. This method is limited in that a) names, pronouns, and social media profiles used to construct the database may not, in every case, be indicative of gender identity and b) it cannot account for intersex, non-binary, or transgender people. We look forward to future work that could help us to better understand how to support equitable practices in science.

Notes

1. These metrics are different from the more well-known journal impact factor, which is a measure of how often articles published in a journal are cited (Garfield 1972). Impact factor also plays an important role in career advancement because many academic institutions expect researchers to publish in journals with high impact factor ratings (Else 2019).

2. The Matthew Effect refers to a passage from the Bible’s book of Matthew 13:12: “For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath” (Bible, King James Version 2022 [1611]).

3. The Matilda Effect was first described by suffragist and abolitionist Matilda Joslyn Gage (1826–1898) in her essay, “Woman as Inventor” (Gage 1883).

4. We use the phrase “scientific and scholarly disciplines” instead of the more commonly used acronym STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) because we think it is important to promote DEI in STEM and non-STEM disciplines, such as the humanities and the arts.

5. The Bechdel test (Bechdel 1986) assesses whether a work (i) features at least two women (ii) who talk to each other (iii) about something other than a man. The correlate in scholarly scientific work would be that a research article cites the ideas of at least x women, places their work in intellectual dialogue with one another, and ensures that the women’s work is not being used simply as a commentary on a man’s work.

6. Important scholarly work points out that a single individual can have an observed race, a self-attested racial identity, a self-classification into a racial category, a reflected race, a racial phenotype, and a racial ancestry. See Roth (2016). Gender has been similarly complexified to include, for example, gender identity, gender expression, gender presentation, and gender role. See Stryker (2017).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences [ZIA102646-10].