Photo: https://www.citeblackwomencollective.org/
Citation Justice is based on a growing body evidence across disciplines that women, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) are cited less frequently than their white male counterparts. Here we examine academia as it relates to categorizations of race, power, and citation. We a look at all forms of marginalized identify in academia, working toward a broader, but inextricably interconnected, web of social justice issues.
Citation Practice has broad implications for who gets a voice in academia. Much of the tenure practice is based on "impact" produced by citations. Academia has been excrutiatingly slow at incorporating different metrics of impact. So who is being cited results in who gets promoted, who conducts research, and the voices that speak in our classrooms.
“Citation behavior is the product of institutional structures and individual habits. Imbalances in citation behavior, therefore, are produced by both institutional biases and individual biases. By bias, we mean discriminatory (or, conversely, preferential) values, practices, or mechanisms, typically resulting in material, psychological, or physical harms.”
Dworkin, J., Zurn, P., & Bassett, D. S. (2020). (In) citing action to realize an equitable future. Neuron, 106(6), 890-894.
In other words, who you choose to cite has an impact on who you see in the classroom, who does research, and stays in academia.
Everyone should be practicing citation justice! Whether you are an undergraduate or a tenured faculty member, whether you study engineering or creative writing, your citation practice is important.
Here are some examples of citation discrimination found in a variety of fields:
Communications
Chakravartty, P., Kuo, R., Grubbs, V., & McIlwain, C. (2018). #CommunicationSoWhite. Journal of Communication, 68(2), 254–266. https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqy003
Neuroscience
Dworkin, J., Zurn, P., & Bassett, D. S. (2020). (In) citing action to realize an equitable future. Neuron, 106(6), 890-894.
Anthropology
Craven, C. (2021). Teaching Antiracist Citational Politics as a Project of Transformation: Lessons from the Cite Black Women Movement for White Feminist Anthropologists. Feminist Anthropology, 2(1), 120-129.
Data Science
D’Ignazio, C., & Klein, L. F. (2020). Data Feminism. MIT Press.
Engineering
Set goals
Obstacles & Considerations
Overcoming Obstacles
Audit
Get feedback
It's important to audit your citations after your first draft and after every round of edits, especially editorial edits. In the book Data Feminism the author's noted that through the open peer review, their citation counts went down.
Citation Diversity Statements are often optional statements published at the end of an article that describes how an author considered equity, diversity, and inclusion in their citation practice. These are often quite short, and discuss both successes and shortcomings in the practice. Below is an example of a more general inclusion and diversity statement that explains how researchers incorporated Inclusion and Diversity throughout their research process.
Image reads: "Inclusion and Diversity Statement: We worked to ensure sex balance in the selection of non-human subjects. One or more of the authors of this paper self-identifies as living with a disability. On or more of the authors of this paper received support from a program designed to increase minority representation in science. The author list of this paper includes contributors from the location where the research was conducted who participated in the data collection, design, analysis, and/or interpretation of the work.": Sweet, D. (2022, February 1). The inclusion and diversity statement – one year on [News from a Publication]. Cell Press. https://www.cell.com/news-do/inclusion-and-diversity-statement-update-2022
See more examples in the paper cited below:
The best way to keep track of citations is by using a citation manager. There are several options, though we recommend using Zotero or Mendeley as both of these tools are free. Many faculty also use EndNote, which has a free web-based version, but the stand alone can be expensive.
For tutorials on how to use citation managers please check out the Research Guide listed below.
For additional help, please contact your subject specialist.
Auditing citations throughout the writing process is crucial to ensuring a diversity of perspectives is included in your bibliography. Using the tools linked below will help you measure the diversity in your list.
You have questions, we have answers! Check out the Frequently Asked Questions below.
Shouldn't you cite good research and not base citations on race or gender?
Sure, inequities exist in citations, but won't we cause an imbalance against white male scholars if we just cite women and BIPOC scholars?
Isn't it problematic to infer the gender or race of people?
I live outside of the United States. Should I still practice citation justice?
Isn't the broader problem that citation counts themselves are not a good way of assessing the quality of research? Shouldn't we address that and this won't matter?