This proposal promoted by “progressive” scientists on how to change the scientific literature is not new. But it may hang around for decades, as it’s also being pushed on young people by scientific societies. It may even persist in the coming years when we have a Democratic President and Congress (fingers crossed).
Up until recently, the normal way to write a paper is this: when you make a statement of known fact, or refer to previous literature, you cite the most important, comprehensive, or relevant papers in parentheses after your assertion An example: “Humans are animals” (Sanders 1856; Jones and Kirkman 1940; Cel-Ray and Tonic, 1956).
The “progressive” scientific ideologues want that changed, as the first article below (just published by the Heterodox Academy and written by Erin Shaw, a woman researcher for the Academy) describes. Instead of citing papers you think best support your statement, one is supposed to cite papers written by people from marginalized groups (usually people of color or women) as a way of bringing equity to the field. This practice is called “citation justice”.
But there are several problems with this practice. Here are a few:
1.) “Citation justice” does not advance science, but is a form of social engineering, turning the scientific literature into a form of affirmative action. It values ethnicity or gender above merit or readers’ knowledge of the field. As Shaw says at the end of her piece:
Engaging with a variety of ideas, texts, and research from an array of scholars across the field is essential to the spirit of the academy and scholarship itself—not to mention necessary for knowledge production. It should be second nature for academics to wade deeply into the literature of their disciplines. As Erec Smith observed last year regarding Nature Reviews Bioengineering’s reasoning for requesting citation diversity statements, “… thoughtfully choosing references and giving sufficient time to survey an entire field is already considered a significant part of scientific research, academic discourse, and critical thinking in general. If scientists are not doing this, the problem isn’t that they are biased; it’s that they are bad scientists.” References should be included in an article because of the ideas within them, not because of the skin color or gender identity of the writers.
Much like DEI statements in faculty hiring, citation diversity statements function as another ideological filter that forces academics to contort themselves and their professional pursuits into ideologically palatable shapes. In explicitly asking authors and reviewers to consider the demographic characteristics of cited sources (and tally them up for presentation), these journals jeopardize the scholarly rigor of scholars and of the journals themselves, which, for better or worse, are the cornerstone of scholarly dissemination.
2.) This practice is often justified, as noted in Shaw’s piece, by saying that minoritized groups are under-cited relative to the quality of their published work. Well, one can’t dismiss that out of hand, but before you go changing the practice of citation, you need to document your claim (this is, after all, science). And I can’t find any evidence that published research by minority groups is cited less than it should be. Also, undercitation is supposed to reflect bigoty, but that too has not been demonstrated and, as those of us in science know, departments are falling all over themselves to hire women and minority scientists and accept them as grad students. If you are indicting “structural racism” as the cause of this phenomenon, which is implicitly the case, then you must show that.
3.) Even if you are committed to this practice, how do you know which authors are to be moved up the citation scale? Well, women may be told apart by their names, though authors are often listed by initials. And imagine what you’d have to do to show undercitation: determine whether a paper should be cited but was not. I haven’t found any literature supporting that (I may have missed some), but without that data one has little empirical justification for initiating “citation justice”. One can’t just show that minoritized authors are under-cited relative to these authors’ publication rate; rather, one has to show that their papers are as good as or better than papers that ARE cited. This becomes even more difficult when one realizes that most scientific papers are never cited at all, or cited maybe once or twice, regardless of authorship.
4.) How do you determine whether a paper is by someone in a minority group? Shaw notes the problem:
Prompting scholars to consider author demographics as they develop their reference lists threatens scholarly rigor. Instead of grappling with the complexity of arguments, theories, and data presented by fellow researchers, academics may find themselves Googling photos of scholars they might cite to see if they can (literally) get more diversity tallies in their reference list to appease the journal. Consequently, the actual accomplishments of scholars, many of whom may have indeed worked very hard to overcome obstacles, risk being tokenized by identitarian orthodoxies.
5.) Inequities in citations may reflect inequities of output, perhaps caused by discrimination in the past that has prevented minorities or women from going into science. But the tweet below shows that a paucity of publication may be more to blame than bigotry:
Authors of a new paper claiming minorities are discriminated against in academia inadvertently revealed that Blacks & Hispanics average far fewer publications than whites & Asians.
They have misrepresented their data to promote DEI. My latest @unherd https://t.co/VxDzbAIpiC pic.twitter.com/lqwzzfRc6e
— Eric Kaufmann (@epkaufm) October 11, 2024
But of course citation justice is supposed to remedy citation inequities, whatever their cause.
6.) There are other groups that are said to be oppressed, like people who are disabled or “neurodiverse”. How would one ever find these? Or is the search limited only to women and scholars of color? Shaw’s conclusion is this:
In theory, citation diversity aims to broaden representation; in practice, it reduces scholarship to a superficial numbers game. True intellectual diversity emerges when scholars engage deeply with the best ideas, wherever they originate—not when journals ask researchers to audit the demographics of their bibliographies. If the goal is to advance science, then intellectual rigor, not ideological conformity, must be the guiding principle.
Again, click the screenshot to read:
I’ve given above some of the problems with “citation justice”. But the article above also documents journals that recommend it. I’ll give a few quotes:
Nature Reviews Psychology editors ask authors to describe how they “explore[d] relevant studies from a diverse group of researchers (including but not limited to diversity in gender, race, career stage and geographical location) before writing their first draft.” The editors suggest these optional citation diversity statements are a way that “scientists can demonstrate their commitment to DEI through actions that are not mandated by institutions or subject to institutional control.” In other words, authors are expected to remain steadfastly committed to the same principles that the federal government is attempting to aggressively quash within universities.
Nature Reviews Psychology’s decisionto encourage citation diversity statements appears to be the latest in a small yet noteworthy movement to embed equity goals explicitly in the scientific publishing process. Several papers have advocated for the practice, and a small number of journals have adopted optional citation diversity statement requests as a part of their article submission processes. Nature Reviews Bioengineering, a sister publication of Nature Reviews Psychology, may have served as an early pilot of the citation diversity statement with Nature after it adopted such a policy in 2023.
The Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) was an early adopter of citation diversity when, in 2021, editors integrated an optional citation diversity statement into the article submission process for its four journals, Annals of Biomedical Engineering, Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering, Cardiovascular Engineering and Technology, and Biomedical Engineering Education.
BMES editors followed the suggestions of citation diversity advocates to straightforwardly ask authors to tally up diversity points. Authors opting into the diversity statement are asked specifically for “the proportion of citations by gender and race/ethnicity for the first and last authors” and “the method used to determine those proportions and its limitations.”
BMES even provides detailed instructions on how proportions should be presented: “The proportions of authors by gender should be divided into four categories based on first/last author combinations: woman/woman, man/woman, woman/man, and man/man. Race and ethnicity proportions should similarly be divided into four categories based on first/last author combinations: author of color/author of color, white author/author of color, author of color/white author, white author/white author.” This numeric scheme raises many unanswered questions about target proportions, cross-cutting identities, and whether authors are deciding which scholars to reference based on perceived demographics rather than scholarly ideas and data presented in their papers.
The practice is spreading into other scientific areas, most distressingly into my own field of evolutionary biology. An article in The College Fix describes an entire session on citation justice at a (2024) Joint Congress on Evolutionary Biology in late July, which brought together the American Society of Naturalists, European Society for Evolutionary Biology, Society of Systematic Biologists, and Society for the Study of Evolution:
“We recognize that we have the responsibility to engage critically with the ideologies and guiding ethics behind our theory and our research and we strive to engage with decolonial practices and methods that have been put forward by indigenous scholars,” said Queen’s University graduate student and self-described “settler” scientist Mia Akbar in her introduction of a symposium she co-organized on “The Politics of Citation in Evolutionary Biology.”
“We’re very committed to trying to make space for voices and perspectives that have been erased by dominant science,” she added.
Haley Branch, a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University, while giving a presentation titled “Ableism as foundation for evolutionary biology,” voiced concern over how the “axiological assumptions” of evolutionary biology are built off of a “white, heteronormative, Christian, Western, male framework.”
I now see that ableism has made it into the list of factors to be considered when citing papers. But Christianity and “heteronormativity”? Are we supposed to cite more non-Christian and gay authors? And how would you know? This suggestion is invidious.
At any rate, here’s the Nature Reviews Psychology paper, which you can access by clicking on the screenshot below:
A quote:
. . . . scientists can demonstrate their commitment to DEI through actions that are not mandated by institutions or subject to institutional control. For example, in a Comment in this issue, Carolyn Quam and Teresa Roberts describe how researchers can move scholarship away from narratives that perpetuate societal biases by writing inclusively. Inclusive writing is an iterative, multi-step process that aims to ensure that scientific writing (including review articles, grant applications and literature-review portions of original research reports) does not centre privileged identities as optimal and normative. Quam and Roberts provide an example of an inclusive writing process for a paper they wrote about language development, illustrating that inclusive writing need not be limited to research that is explicitly about marginalized groups or diversity. Importantly, although inclusive writing is an individual act, it can inform systemic change by influencing scientific norms.
At Nature Reviews Psychology, we are now explicitly encouraging authors to take up one of the steps involved in inclusive writing discussed by Quam and Roberts: diversifying citation practices.
The number of citations a paper receives does not necessarily reflect the quality of its research. However, citations can influence a researcher’s career through speaking invitations, grants, awards and promotions. Thus, representation in reference lists has important consequences for representation in science: if citations are systematically biased against, for example, female authors, then female authors will have CVs or grant applications that are less competitive than those of their male counterparts. Moreover, a systematic citation bias against women means that the field is not properly benefiting from their scientific contributions.
To address such citation biases, we are encouraging authors to explore relevant studies from a diverse group of researchers (including but not limited to diversity in gender, race, career stage and geographical location) before writing their first draft. We are further encouraging them to include a citation diversity statement in the article to acknowledge these efforts (see here for an example from one of our sister journals) and to make others aware of citation imbalances.
Note that they add geography and career stage to the list as well as gender and ethnicity. It’s hard enough to write a paper when you know your research area, much less having to look up the age, ethnicity, gender, geographical location, and able-ness of an author.
And the Nature paper gives this as a peroration:
Part of the stated mission of Nature Reviews Psychology is to represent the diversity of psychological science and all those who consider themselves psychological scientists. We act with this mission in mind when we consider who we invite to write and review for us. We are now asking authors to participate in our mission by actively thinking about who they are citing, which will ultimately improve the diversity and quality of the science we publish.
The last paragraph explicitly equates (citation) diversity with quality of the papers that employ citation diversity. That is an assertion with absolutely no evidence to back it up. But it doesn’t need evidence because the editors are dissimulating here: they are not interesting in increasing the quality of science, but in promoting “equity” among scientists.
Science is best served not by using it as a tool to advance DEI, but as a tool to advance our understanding of nature. If you want to engage in DEI, by all means do so on your own time, not in your scientific publications.
Further, it’s stuff like this endeavor that may have contributed to America’s declining trust in both academia and science. I have no proof for the causation of these phenomena, but I doubt that people would trust science more if they knew it was being used for social engineering in a “progressive” way, not to help us understand nature.
h/t: Luana
“But the tweet below shows that a paucity of publication may be more to blame than bigotry…”
So not only will we have “citation justice”, but this will be interpreted as a reason for journals to preferentially accept publications from underrepresented scientists. In other words, this will only lead to even more social engineering.
So if you are a minority scientist, you may be sought after by colleagues to be put on publications as a prominent author even if you had nothing to do with the study.
The effect of all of this social engineering will be a lot more time and effort taken away from legitimate research in order to jump through these hoops. It will dilute science even more and do little to help underrepresented groups.
Also…I am starting to wonder how it is that social justice seems to be the main concern of many practitioners. I assume that the reason somebody gets a doctorate in evolutionary biology is to…do evolutionary biology. Why fritter away one’s time on things that have nothing to do with original research in your field?
I’ve been reading a lot of Hawaiian and Pacific History lately. Modern historians of these topics seems to be woke without exception. (It’s a great geography to expose how evil the West is.) I find the issue isn’t that they don’t cite the most comprehensive and authoritative works, but that the content itself is often just a rehash of other Social Justice literature. They accept the assertions as fact and just apply them to local events.
Another example of science going down the drain. The current administration won’t be able to stop this.
No? Citation (and other) wokenesses (weaknesses?) will disappear when science funding and research are stopped.
Does career stage mean when paper was written or when it was cited?
A suggestion: “marginalized” could be in quotes, since it is woke phrasing, it’s a “done to” word implying that some groups are being oppressed, actively pushed to the margins. More neutral alternatives would be “minority” or “under-represented”.
Similarly, “minoritized” is a woke version of the more-neutral “minority”, a done-to word deriving from the idea that all such groups (including “women”!) are social constructs, and that the white oppressors have deliberately made some groups into minorities.
And of course there are plenty of groups that are indeed minorites but are not under-cited (I’m betting that Ashkenazis are not under-cited in modern science relative to their population fraction!).
Those of Ashkenazi identity are probably OVERcited relative to their population. This violation of citation Equity will be corrected by DEI commissars at the journals.
Other violations of Citation Justice—for example, the citation of papers that were correct more often than those that were incorrect—will be taken up next.
Levelling-down is oh so much easier than levelling-up.
🎯
Okay, conflicting goals here. First, we MUST have the best scientific foundations (including citations) for our work wherever and by whomever these sources were published. That is, WE should not discriminate by various socio-political or -cultural categories what and whom we cite.
Second, there is some really good work going on in communities that do not get the exposure and attention that the quality of the work deserves. And some of this co-varies with the social standing of the community or region or academic institution to which the authors/researchers/publications belong.
In our research and writing courses, we DO teach our students to look more deeply to find quality work that may not appear in the first page from a search engine. And they find some gems.
Case in point: in research on the performance of virtual anatomic databases compared to “traditional” cadaveric dissection, the US literature is full of studies about how students like or respond to the alternative. Very little focus is on how well they learned from the electronic alternatives. We found a couple of gems from African and Asian universities that addressed the main point: are students learning effectively?
It was first-rate research, filled in a gap, and even added various options: Virtual reality, physical models, interactive websites, etc. PLUS it made the assessment of the problem more universal by extending the data and analysis to institutions, students, and situations that might have been overlooked.
The inclusion of these other journals, researchers, institutions broadened the view of the problem and added a perspective that we weren’t getting from the USAnian literature alone. So, we encouraged our students to look more systematically for those sources.
The other problem, of course, is that except for choosing an article in, say, an African journal by researchers in African universities, etc. the sorts of information we need to comply with the “citation justice” models are not easy to ascertain for most articles. How exactly does one comply unless we all identify ourselves using all these criteria somehow in our work (which seems irrelevant to the quality and import)?
Pronouns are one thing (and I am grateful when my non-Western on-line students provide them). But how to convey all the other identity markers? Seems like the equivalent of an MHC system for publications, and as complex.
This problem is easily solved. In the radiant future, all publications will be required to include the authors’ positionality statements, providing all the needed information as to pronouns, gender-identity, racial identity, position in the victim hierarchy, etc.
If the future becomes truly radiant, all clothing will also be required to reveal all the
features of everyone’s positionality. Then, everyone’s position in the hierarchy will be obvious at a distance, at least with the use of telescopes. Come to think of it, wasn’t this customary in the awfully Progressive period now labelled medieval?
I have mixed feelings about this issue. On the one hand, I agree that what you cite should be good exemplars of the science or knowledge that you are concerned discussing. No contest there.
On the other hand, I also see and continue to see works being cited simply because they are seen as “indispensable” and because citing them shows that you are familiar with whoever is hot at moment. My observation, over the years, has been that an astonishing number of “indispensable” works turn out to be written by people in the USA, or by the authors of the article themselves.
So I do aspire to diversity in who and how I cite, but not the diversity that is being focussed on by Shaw and the editorial in NRP. I would like some of my North American colleagues to think about reading more widely. In my field (linguistics), that means considering some of the 6000+ languages that are not English and Spanish. When I write, I am trying to inform others, not just affirm my place in The Club. When I read, I want my little view of the world to be expanded.
I hope this doesn’t infuriate readers from North America or the US in general, so before piling on to me, I’d just ask you to think for a minute.
The problem is that these papers that you want people to cite are not in English, and the problem mentioned in this article is for Anglophones. Now that foreign languages are not required for a Ph.D., there aren’t that many scientists who can read papers in other languages, and almost none of them read journals written in other languages.
No, that’s not the problem. English is the lingua franca for linguistics.
She’s not referring to papers written in other languages but on other languages. In Linguistics, work on English is much more likely to be cited than comparable work on any other language. A younger colleague I know who studies Greek in a minority-language context has switched his research to studying a dialect of American English because his previous work wasn’t getting cited. My original PhD dissertation topic was going to be a study of a language in Central Africa but my supervisor advised me to switch to studying English if I wanted to get an academic job.
Self-citation is something that citation metrics already account and correct for.
They’re The Elect, leading the repair of a previously fractured world, where power languishes in the empty husks, and truth lies in the marginalized sparks – progressing through an esoteric drama, returning to the whole.^*
—break, now back down-to-Earth—
“An example: “Humans are animals” (Sanders 1856; Jones and Kirkman 1940; Cel-Ray and Tonic, 1956).”
This, however, is important! Going into my bibliography base immediately.
*inspired by ‘Yuri Bezmenov’s Ghost’ on eXtwitter, …as well as John McWhorter’s accurate “The Elect“.
And then we are surprised that trust in science and academia is all-time low? Seriously, when our flagship journals replace rigor by DEI, one cannot blame people who become skeptical of scientists and their published work.
We wrote about the corruption of scientific publishing back in 2023, and, as this post illustrates, it is only getting worse:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/european-review/article/critical-social-justice-subverts-scientific-publishing/29AF22D23835C74AECDA7964E55812CF
It would be less harmful to science, and serve the same “equity” goal, to simply pad the citations section of a paper with a heap of completely irrelevant papers by minority authors. Or would the blatant degree of patronisation be too much for the woke? I mean, they are already patronising minorities with so-called “citation justice” so it’s just (apologies to WSC) haggling over the price after that.
Abigail Thompson’s “Two Universities Redux” (Knowledge U and Ideology U) in “The War on Science” seems to be getting a cousin, “Two Journals”: “Knowledge journal” supporting 400 years of enlightenment science progress and now the upstart “ideology or social justice journal” bringing to a close the era of science as we have known it and in support of everyone getting a trophy.
“Nothing’s really changed for minorities in the last 75 years” + “It’s better to be nice than right” = Citation Justice.
But that’s blatantly oppressive to the Not Nice community. Unfair.
These days, very few scientific papers are published under the name of a single author. Most have two, three, four or multiple authors, sometimes a very large number – I’ve seen examples where the list of author names is longer than the paper Abstract. How do the advocates of “citation justice” propose we incorporate this? Do we choose to cite (or not) based on the identity of the lead author? Wouldn’t that lead to further injustice if I fail to cite a paper on the grounds that the lead author is a white male, but where most of his 20 co-authors are women or “people of colour”? Or do they suggest that we should conduct a comprehensive biographic analysis of all listed authors, record their relative positions in the author list, and feed the data into some kind of algorithm to generate a “marginality score”, on the basis of which we decide to cite or not to cite? I can imagine that performing that piece of research would take longer than the science we were actually trying to publish.
Alternatively, maybe we could avoid the problem altogether if we set up separate scientific journals for each specified identity group, where authors would only cite fellow group members. That way, people submitting their work to the Disabled Trans Lesbian of Colour Journal of Invertebrate Physiology could rest assured that their citation lists would not be contaminated by horrible white males or others higher up on the scale of oppression.
It would be helpful to learn WHO is behind this foolery. Many years ago, I had some brisk exchanges with publication offices of two journals (one in biochem, the other in theoretical biology) over papers of mine which they were preparing for publication. They had made minor changes in my wording which damaged the meaning (and in one case created a mathematical error). I learned then that some editorial assistants at the journals were graduates in English or Communications who knew very little about the subject matter of the journal they worked at.
Maybe, during the last decade, such individuals have accrued enough influence to slip DEIization into journal policy and policy statements. I suppose some recent graduates in social science fields may identify with the DEI anointed, but can this
possibly be true in engineering fields? Ye gods.
I, for one, welcome citation justice. Finally I can submit manuscripts fully written by ChatGPT, to make the voice of the hallucinated sources heard. Imaginary people have been underrepresented in science for too long! Enough is enough!
On a more serious note:
I need to found three new journals ASAP:
– Women’s Journal of Science (WJS)
– Annals of the Colored Scientists (ACS)
– Proceedings of the Differently Abled (PDA)
The scope of all three journals would be women / people of color / people with disabilities restating known facts (with proper citations) from all fields of science. That way, progressive US scientists will certainly cite my journals for everything, since there will be a guarantee that the authors are exclusively from the appropriate minority – no googling biographies / photos required. Just make sure half your citations are from one of my three journals and you are set. I’ll even offer a Python script that takes your reference, checks which of the journals’ article references that paper as well and replace your original primary reference with the secondary reference that has 100% more justice!
I just can’t wait to read the inaugural issue of the Journal of Gay Chemistry.
If I decide to call myself nonbinary, would my papers get cited more often? Why not. We have plenty of pretendians and other pretenders to victim status. It’s not as if the word nonbinary means anything. If I have a whimsy to call myself nonbinary, I’d love to see someone try to prove that I’m not.
I think I will start self-identifying as mon(et)ary
A great example of why DEI/Critical Justice and its offshoots deserve to be regarded as a religion: the deliberate adoption of patently false beliefs as articles of faith, the acceptance of which forms a test of a believer’s commitment to the cause. As each one is accepted, a new article of faith, each more outlandish than the last, is presented. Once one has accepted the core principles — that oppression status is the only metric on which support/inclusion/publication should be judged, there is no limit to the potential idiocy of each new instantiation. Like traditional Catholic doctrine, the more transparently invented and unsupported by evidence the belief is, the greater is the virtue in accepting it.
There is going to be a tipping point soon.
Legitimate scientists and scholars must feel a bit like Gulliver being tied down by the Lilliputians. These feckless administrators, mediocrities, and ideologues in pseudodisciplines like “gender studies” will eventually push too far, and the real women and men of science will go and form their own institutions and organizations.
“will eventually push to far”
They did. 11/5/2024 followed.
Really? OMG.
Let’s take the Science Citation Index and, for every person cited, determine an “Identity Index” for that person, say W for wh*te, B for Black, GF for gay female, Z for Zionist, etc. Darwin’s identity would obviously be characterized as W, for example. (I’m not sure how I would be characterized, but I would leave that to the geniuses who are in charge of this nonsense.) And then, obviously, let’s republish the index with each person’s Identity Index by the name. Then from now on, let’s have an algorithm scan every article submitted for publication, compare the citations to the (neo-)Science Citation Index, and then let’s calculate a “Citation Justice Score” for the submitted article. To be published, the article would need to score above a certain number.
Really? Are you kidding me? Are we really that messed up?
Is there any reason to think it won’t be worse under a Democratic President and Congress? The Rot of Woke started well before Trump.
At the risk of over-commenting, I cannot resist pointing out a historical precedent. In the galaxy far away, its authoritarian structure made heterodoxy really dangerous during the Lysenkovshchina’s worst phase, but it also facilitated the reversal of Lysenkoism once the authorities decided to change. Could it be that a limited degree of authoritarianism here might likewise help to reverse the damages of DEI?
The Soviet decision to change was influenced by a 1964 audit of Lysenko’s model farm in the Lenin Hills, revealing that it had cooked the books in regard to milk butterfat content and other data. Apparently, this helped to convince the Party leadership that Lysenko was selling a bill of fake goods. Maybe an audit of effects of DEI in some practical arena—e.g., in engineering, space exploration, or perhaps in medical technology—could be helpful today in a similar fashion.
(Bold added):
“Could it be that a limited degree of authoritarianism here might likewise help to reverse the damages of DEI?”
This is what is anticipated by dialectic – by the Leftist theories under the hood. Its machinations want an authoritarian pendulum swing that will ultimately advance Leftism along its designed pathway.
This is where the dumbass Woke Right radicals are generally right now – getting played by the smartass Woke Left radicals.
Principles are what matters most – that and throwing sand in the gears / naming the dynamic of the dialectical development.
/MyBestJamesLindsayImpersonation
James Lindsay has a graphic on one of his podcasts that shows a pendulum swinging forth and back but advancing some cartoon mechanism always in a leftist direction even when the pendulum swings back. It’s not even just a ratchet effect. The ticks and the tocks of a pendulum clock both drive the hands always in the same direction.
If you listen carefully, the tick in a pendulum clock is a slightly different sound from the tock. That makes metaphorical sense because the Left has to do different things to advance the dialectic when the pendulum is swinging Right, such as incite repression, just as the clock’s escapement does.
To press the analogy, the pendulum doesn’t even actually drive the clockwork. That’s done by the energy stored in the winding spring, or the arrangement of falling weights in really old clocks, acting directly on the escapement which is designed to run in one direction only. The pendulum is just the regulator, the timekeeper, driven itself by the energy source that already knows, before it nudges the pendulum in either direction, what its agenda is. So No, letting the pendulum swing to the right won’t reverse the clock. You have to smash it.
Mmm
Verge and foliate
“So No, letting the pendulum swing to the right won’t reverse the clock. You have to smash it.”
What is the real-world equivalent of “smashing it” in your metaphor?
… but an audit is a great idea!
😁
Not just historical precedent. The CCP system of social credit could easily be adapted to the STEM publishing system. We already have unique identifiers (ORCID) and a citation-tracking system (Web of Science). All that’s needed are demographic markers for each author published in a positionality statement for each article (per your comment @ 6) and some added searchable demographic fields for individual articles in WoS (per Norman @ 18).
A clever person could then develop a citation justice score for each unique author in the system. Would require an algorithm to adapt one’s score in light of the citation justice scores of one’s coauthors (per David Hughes @ 13).
Then one could require each individual to present her citation justice score when submitting a journal article for review (much like people in China must present a social credit score for everyday transactions in businesses, banks, or services). If your score is high your manuscript could be accepted as submitted (maybe with an editorial to highlight its stunning and brave qualities); if your score is only decent then they’ll send your manuscript to your former PhD advisor for pal (rather than peer) review; if your score is low then your manuscript goes to world experts for review, including a third reviewer who will require additional experiments
And if your score is far below par then it’s desk rejection for you, with a scolding never to darken our door again.
A citation justice score could be handy in other STEM decision making both big (awards, grants, jobs) and small (who gets the sunny office with a view; who has to teach at 8:30 in the morning next semester). Tons of upside.
That’s the only Hitler’s Rage parody where I actually feel sympathy for the poor “Hitler.”
Kurt Vonnegut’s story “Harrison Bergeron” comes to mind. There do seem to be a lot of journals whose editors are nothing more than “Handicapper Generals.”
“Yes, Yes!” He said grabbing his buttock…if memory serves from the mid-70’s.
What a bunch of non-sense.
I can tell you that one of the biggest sources of citation bias are where authors cite themselves (which is understandable. Your past research is most relevant to your current research). Another is that you cite papers written by your collaborators, and by your buddies. This too is also understandable.
So… in some future date I suppose authors will have a string of numbers and letters attached to their names to identify every possible identity.
Hi. I am a “s-w-a-m-60+” (straight white able-bodied male in my 60’s).
But No One will want to cite a s-w-a-m-60+!
Overfishing; eating the seed-corn; burning the house to keep warm; squandering acquired trust and other social capital; cooking the books; citation justice —
symptoms of quick-fix death spirals.
i was very (very) indirectly connected with two accounting scandals, maybe three
I presume these did not end well for the perpetrators; not to mention the victims, which I hope did not include you.
A close friend was a partner in an accounting firm where another partner had a hidden gambling addiction. It took years for my friend to get unwound from the mess — joint and several partnership liability. (And somewhat related, don’t get me started on banks and fiduciary responsibility or lack thereof.)
The perpetrators (of the accounting scandals) all went to prison. Some died behind bars (and deserved it). I did not lose a penny in any of the scandals (I was not an investor). I did write a letter to the President (of the US) asking for a pardon for one of the guilty parties (yes, she was quite guilty).
Claudine Gay has a citation count of 2,600. By contrast Alan Garber has citation count of nearly 20,000. Predictably, Alan Garber has authored or co-authored many books. The book count for Claudine Gay was/is zero.