Citation is very important to a researcher’s career. What, after all, are research findings worth if no one knows about them?
A Look at a New Move
In 2022 in Nature, Diana Kwon offered a look at a new move toward citation justice:
For many decades, scholars have noted the uneven nature of recognition and credit in academia. The ‘Matthew effect’, which describes the snowballing advantage that accrues to scholars who are already successful, was popularized in the 1960s. And in the 1990s, the ‘Matilda effect’ was coined to describe the phenomenon in which women’s contributions were undervalued, or attributed to men.
Over the past decade or so, bibliometric assessments have shown how citation rates for men are, on average, higher than those for women across a wide range of fields, including economics, astronomy, neuroscience and physics — even when controlling for other factors that might influence citations, such as author seniority, or the year or the journal in which a paper is published (see ‘Overcited, undercited’). Men also cite their own work more often than women do. A gap exists among racial and ethnic categories, too, with white scholars being cited at higher rates than people of colour in several disciplines.
“The rise of citational justice: how scholars are making references fairer, March 22, 2022 (citations omitted)
Part of it, Kwon notes, is that researchers are more likely to cite people they know. Or insiders, prominent voices, and sources who write in famous places or widely spoken languages. That often disadvantages members of minorities of various types.
Some want to do more than raise awareness of this problem; they want, for example, “papers to include the proportions of citations in terms of the gender and race or ethnicity of the referenced authors.”
How Would Such Changes Work Out in Practice?
Many disciplines in science are facing credibility problems created by abandonment of guiding principles, abuses of AI, lack of transparency, or the inroads of Cancel Culture. It’s too early to say what might result from efforts at citation justice. But I do want to call attention to one thing: a key difference in nuance between how it is described in the leading science journal and how it may be interpreted in the field. That may help with predictions:
What is citation justice?
Citation justice or critical citation involves recognizing and acknowledging the intellectual and creative contributions of individuals and groups with diverse backgrounds, experiences, and viewpoints. The goal of critical citation is to address and counteract the existing power imbalances that have historically favored some groups while unfairly disadvantaging and underrepresenting others (Ivins, 2024).
Why does it matter?
In many fields of study, the same prominent scholars are perpetually cited, creating an exclusionary cycle towards academics of marginalized communities including women, people of color, and those within the LGBTQ+ community (Craft-Morgan, 2024).
By disregarding these scholars, the valuable information and perspectives they bring to their research and field is also overlooked. Practicing citation justice yields richer and more comprehensive analyses while crediting scholars whose valuable contributions could go unrecognized or underrecognized (Kwon, 2022).
Citations justice is not only a matter of credit and recognition. Many colleges and universities take scholarly publication into account when considering a faculty member for tenure and/or promotion. This can include examining the number of times the faculty member’s work is cited (Chenevey, 2023).
SUNY Geneseo, Milne Library
It’s curious that the groups intended to benefit here are identity groups. Geography, language, and proximity to powerful people have all disappeared. Here’s another one:
What is citation justice?
Citation Justice is the act of consciously citing people with marginalized identities to up lift their voices.
Practicing citation justice allows us to use our reference lists to challenge oppressive systems that have silenced and erased the intellectual contributions of women and BIPOC scholars.
Towson University, Albert S. Cook Library
This would be more reassuring if it were accompanied up front by a commitment to cite only relevant, quality research from any source used. Otherwise, the system risks degenerating into a spoils system in aid of the specific listed groups.
That intention is made clear here:
What is citation justice?
Citation justice is the process for being intentional about who you cite in your own work to uplift and center gender-diverse, Black, Indigenous, people of colour, S2LGBTQIA+ folxs.
Typically, we seek information and sources that reflect who we are and our identities. This is referred to as positionality.
Positionality refers to locating ourselves within our social, political, and cultural context. This can include (but is not limited to) race, gender and sexual identity, class, political beliefs, cultural and education experiences and more. These impact the point of view and perspective that you have in doing research. Being aware of that and what and how you look at the sources of information you are finding to incorporate into your work is important. Otherwise, we are at risk of only choosing perspectives, approaches, and content that aligns with our own positionality.
University of British Columbia
To “Uplift and Center”
Here we are to cite the work of others to “uplift and center” them. Strengthening our own work with the most informative research does not sound like a similar priority.
Elsewhere, I have talked about the growth of private truth in science: a growing collection of truths found in the emotional needs of humans that bear little relationship to evidence from nature. Citation justice, interpreted as set out in the library sources above, could certainly strengthen the impact of some private truths. It could go so far as to render them unassailable in many venues.
But the problem that all private truth presents to science is that it lacks the power that public, evidence-based truth has to compel reasoned assent. And when reason appears mainly as the voice of evidence-based dissent, the public will trust science even less than it now does.