Making up the footnotes
Wait a second…
Citation Justice – what it is and how you can practice it
Citations play a powerful role in academia, both institutionally and for individual careers. They form the bedrock of research assessment practices and are increasingly influential in job applications, promotions, grant applications and university rankings. There is no denying that citations matter. However, there is increasing evidence that women, people of colour, and other minoritised groups are systemically under cited, serving to exclude and silence many voices from scholarly and academic debates. Take a look at the paper you’re writing, or the texts in your reading lists: how many of these authors are men and/or white? How many women or people of colour have you cited? Are those that you are citing only established authors, or have you made space for new and emerging voices? All of these questions will reflect the extent to which you are representing the diversity of thought and authorship in your field.
But…I hate to belabor the obvious, but that’s not how citations work. Academics seek sources that are relevant to their subject matter, and high quality. They don’t seek them in order to tick some boxes. I know that’s a bromide whenever the subject of affirmative action comes up, but still, when it comes to academic research, the content and quality and relevance are what count.
Citation justice is using the power of citations to address the historical and persistent undercitation of certain groups by changing citation practices. As part of Birmingham Business School’s Decolonisation Project, we have been exploring the issue of citation justice within our own research culture. Working closely with the Library Services team, we’ve begun to look at citations in both our research and our teaching, to understand how these can be changed.
But it isn’t about “justice.” It’s about content. It’s certainly true that, for instance, women and non-white people have been left out of a lot of history, so urging historians to seek out areas that are not 100% pale male to research makes sense. If a particular book ignores women and/or non-white people when they were right there the whole time, say that. But telling scholars to change their citations for demographic reasons is just silly.
This isn’t nearly as bad as what I was expecting. I was expecting it to be a follow-up to the piece about universal values and skills as “white culture”, that it would say that it’s unfair to ask non-white non-“cis” people to include citations in their papers.
Compared to that, this isn’t so bad!
How would one know the race and sex of the authors cited without doing hours of needless research? Citation and bibliography styles like APA (widely used in the sciences), IEEE (comp sci and engineering) and Chicago (humanities) use only the author’s initials and last name.
As I recall, this was initially proposed as a way of avoiding discrimination against women by concealing their first names and putting everyone on an equal footing. It also considerably shortens citations of multi-author papers. Now, instead of the academic equivalent of a blind audition, “justice” demands active discrimination?! Make it make sense!
Many years ago when the world was young and I was starting my doctoral research, an important person in the field of pepsin research was a Russian called L. Lokshina. Knowing more about Russian surnames than the people around me I referred to her as “she”, but no one else did. That had no influence whatever on whether I cited her work or not. Years later, when I was working on something else, I had a conversation with someone I met at a congress in Chicago, who said that in his view the most important contributions to pepsin research had been made by “the Russians”, meaning Lokshina and collaborators. I don’t know if he was aware that he was praising a woman’s research.
One of the most highly cited papers — by far — in biochemistry is that of Michaelis and Menten (1913). Until the last 30 years or so ago only a tiny proportion of the people who cited them realized that Menten was a woman — a beautiful woman, as it happens, which you may regard as irrelevant, except that it may encourage attractive young women to realize that being physically attractive need not be an obstacle in science.
I have rather an androgynous name, and quite a few people — including my wife — thought that I was a woman when they knew my work before they knew me.