Citation justice: A critical look at citation practices

Critical citation starts with your research process, and how and where you search for knowledge. Consider whether your research processes and search strategies privilege knowledge grounded in Western biases and perspectives.

• Peer-reviewed, top-tier academic journals, while useful for research, must also be placed in context and evaluated for bias. Mainstream, peer-reviewed scholarly sources are disproportionately written in English, by white authors (Inefuku, 2021, p.199).
• Since knowledge is not only contained in academic, peer-reviewed journal articles, go beyond the library to find other forms of knowledge, such as experiential knowledge and cultural knowledge. This may involve a number of strategies including searching the internet, social media, speaking with experts and communities, and listening to Elders (Antoine et al. as cited in Campbell & Sich, 2023, p.19; Edwards 2020).
• Consider evaluating your sources against the Indigenous Research Evaluation Questions, outlined in the Critical Indigenous Research Toolkit, developed by the Xwi7xwa Library at the University of British Columbia. Evaluation areas include: Validation and Verification; Evidence; Cultural Respect and Competency; Terminology and Writing; and Ethics and Consent.
• Consider how search tools, media, and algorithms have inherent biases and limitations, which impact your search results (Howard & Knowlton, 2018; Noble, 2018; Stevens et al., 2021).

Image Credit: Research justice from DataCenter.org.

If conducting an evidence synthesis, there are a variety of ways to incorporate citation justice and equity-focused practices in your review. These practices are aligned with the objective of comprehensiveness and are specifically mentioned in review guidelines and methodologies. Evidence syntheses such as systematic reviews and scoping reviews aim to gather all available evidence on a topic, and this means going beyond what is most easily located. The following are some of the ways you can take a citation justice lens and equity focus in your evidence synthesis reviews:

• Most of the databases used in evidence synthesis have disproportionately higher coverage of literature from Western countries. When working on a global topic, question how well your sources are representative of global coverage. If your topic is regionally limited, ensure that you are including appropriate regional sources. For example, if your topic focuses on regions in Africa, you will need to go beyond databases such as Web of Science, and Scopus whose coverage of African journals is known to be lacking, and consider searching sources such as Africa Journals Online or African Index Medicus.
• Include grey literature sources, and take a focused approach to finding grey literature specific to different regions in the world.
• Do not use language limits in your search strategy or as part of your inclusion criteria. Google translate does an adequate job of translating abstracts which can be used during screening to identify relevant studies in languages beyond English. The Cochrane Handbook provides specific guidance around this in sections 3.4 (eligibility based on language), and 4.4.5 (language restrictions). The recommended practice is to identify studies in languages other than English and provide their citation information even if they are not included in the analysis (due to feasibility and language translation limitations).

Make an appointment to chat with your subject librarian if you need assistance with database or source selection for your evidence synthesis review.

Related resources

There are a number of resources for identifying scholarship by diverse voices.  Below are just a few.