Citation justice: A critical look at citation practices

When engaging in critical citation it is important to consider your own positionalities and reflect on potential biases, power, and privileges. Your positionality "affects every phase of the research process, from the way the question or problem is initially constructed, designed and conducted to how others are invited to participate, the ways in which knowledge is constructed and acted on and, finally, the ways in which outcomes are disseminated and published" (Rowe, 2014, p. 628). 

Often what sources we cite, and which scholars we cite, is a reflection of our positionality (Jacobson & Mustafa, 2019). Stepping back and considering your various identities, such as gender, ethnicity, class, education level, sexual orientation, among many other factors, and how these interconnect with your worldview, helps build the self-awareness essential for critical citation.

One method for engaging in critical citation is to audit your works cited and/or bibliography. However, there is no perfect tool for this work, and evaluating your citations from a critical citation perspective involves ethical, conceptual, and methodological difficulties.

Challenges when searching for researcher diversity:

• Author names don't necessarily inform gender or ethnicity. Many names are not gender specific, people can take on varied surnames through marriage, adoption, and so on.
• Many citation styles use the author first initial and last name format, which masks gender. (Earhart et al., 2021, p. 591).  MLA, Chicago, and ASA allow surname plus given names, APA, Vancouver, AMA, NLM, AIP, ACS, CSE, and IEEE, continue to specify surname and initials only (Fowler, 2019). On the other hand, some authors appreciate the way initials mask gender or name ethnicity, particularly if they feel revealing their gender or 'ethnic'-sounding name will unduly influence readers by attaching assumptions to their work (Corman, 2018, para. 7).

Auditing your citations:

Manually

This approach involves manually checking your citations in order to evaluate the authors you have cited. In some cases it can be helpful to do this work using simple spreadsheet that contains all references, including authors, where you can track information you are compiling (Bird, 2022, 102).

You can locate information about authors through:

• Publication: Does the publication, such as an article or a book, include any information about the author? Frequently information about the author is included in the publication.
• Publicly available information about authors available online, such as institutional websites, professional platforms (such as ResearchGate or LinkedIn), personal websites, social media platforms,
• In some cases you may want to contact an author (Sloan, 2017) or with wider scholars in the same field (Dickersin et al, 1998) to confirm you have accurate information.  

While some information, such as institutional affiliation, may be readily available, other information may be more difficult to determine. For example. identities around ethnicity and gender are complex, and can be fluid (Bhopal, 2004; Roth, 2016).

Using Automated Software

While more accurate, manually collecting data about authors can be time-consuming.  Other options include using open-source software to automate this work. Some studies have used automation, such as machine-learning, to determine authors' ethnicity or gender by their names (West et al, 2013; Freeman and Huang, 2015; AlShebli et al, 2018). While time-saving, such tools should be used with consideration for the complexities machine-learning does not presently account for.

Examples of tools can be found in the links below, and if you use them, use with caution as noted above.

A citation diversity statement is a further means to supporting a critical citation practice. A citation diversity statement can: "(i) hold yourself accountable, (ii) increase global awareness of citation imbalance, and (iii) point future readers to relevant tools for mitigating disparity" (Dworkin 2022). 

Citation diversity statements are personal, written from your perspective and reflecting your research and field. In writing a citation diversity statement, elements you may consider including are:

(i) the importance of citation diversity,

(ii) the percentage breakdown (or other diversity indicators) of citations in the paper,

(iii) the method by which percentages were assessed and its limitations, and

(iv) a commitment to improving equitable practices in science" (Zurn et al., 2020, 669).

For examples of citation diversity statements, see:

Dworkin, J., Zurn, P., & Bassett, D. S. (2020). (In)citing action to realize an equitable future. Neuron, 106(6), 890–894. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2020.05.011

Zurn, P., Bassett, D. S., & Rust, N. C. (2020). The citation diversity statement: A Practice of transparency, A way of life. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 24(9), 669–672. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2020.06.009

Both inline citations and works cited lists involve making decisions about who to cite, and how you cite them. If referring to a researcher in your writing, you may want to refer to the author by their last name if you do no know their pronouns, or you may choose the more inclusive they/them, over she/he/his/her. 

Researchers' names may change over time. If the author has changed their given name in any way and some of their earlier works are published under that name (stage names, pen names, dead name) consider these approaches for how best to cite their work:

• How does the author cite their own previous work? Review their most recent work to see if they refer to their earlier works in any specific way.  Some may retroactively change their name/initials to earlier works, or may use the dead name associated with their earlier work (Corman, 2018, para. 4).
• Just as you can look researchers up when you audit your citations, you can do the same when considering what name to cite.  For example, the website ORCID.org is a database of scholarly works maintained by authors. Authors can create and change the author’s name and unique author bibliographic identification number for a past work (published under a dead name) so that the citations in the new name are completely compliant (Corman, 2018).

"Some contemporary practices in publishing are inadequate to express concepts of relationship and responsibility of an author to the knowledge and/or knowledge keeper cited. At worst, citation practices that centre authors as the “creators” of long-standing community-based knowledge may in fact perpetuate colonial harms through failing to properly recognize the existence and care of knowledge within communities" (Hancock et al, 2022, p. 3)

To acknowledge community based knowledge researchers can add a statement to the beginning of their paper.  For an example of this see Dorothy Christian's Gathering knowledge: Indigenous methodologies of land/place-based visual storytelling/filmmaking and visual sovereignty.

Christian, D. (2017). Gathering knowledge : Indigenous methodologies of land/place-based visual storytelling/filmmaking and visual sovereignty. University of British Columbia. Retrieved from https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/ubctheses/24/items/1.0343529