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Citation for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion: How To Guide

Helping students and faculty incorporate more diversity, equity, and inclusion into their research using Libraries resources

The Nitty Gritty

Set goals

  •  Who do you want to cite?
  •  Articulate why this is important
  • Find citations from BIPoC researchers (see resources below for tools)

Obstacles & Considerations

  • An example of an obstacle might be how to track Race. Race is a binary (black and white), so if you want to incorporate other marginalized groups, you may also want to look at ethnicity.
  • What about white passing Black folks? Determining how an individual identifies can be difficult.
  • If you want to cite trans folks, is this a form of outing? Do you include dead names, as publishing has not prioritized removing dead names?

Overcoming Obstacles

  • Create reading lists or find other reading lists that are already created
  • Find a leading BIPoC researcher - who are they citing?
  • Ask your librarian
  • Social Media

Audit

  • How well did you do?
  • How/where can you improve?
  • What were the biggest hurdles?
  • How did you overcome those hurdles?
  • Audit again (and again, and again…)
    • Note any decreases during the editing process - why is this happening?

Get feedback

  • White folks: Do not constantly ask your BIPoC colleagues - they have a lot of work already
  • Set up a core group of researchers that will hold you accountable

It's important to audit your citations after your first draft and after every round of edits, especially editorial edits. In the book Data Feminism the author's noted that through the open peer review, their citation counts went down.

Citation Diversity Statements are often optional statements published at the end of an article that describes how an author considered equity, diversity, and inclusion in their citation practice. These are often quite short, and discuss both successes and shortcomings in the practice. Below is an example of a more general inclusion and diversity statement that explains how researchers incorporated Inclusion and Diversity throughout their research process.

An image of an example diversity statement

Image reads: "Inclusion and Diversity Statement: We worked to ensure sex balance in the selection of non-human subjects. One or more of the authors of this paper self-identifies as living with a disability. On or more of the authors of this paper received support from a program designed to increase minority representation in science. The author list of this paper includes contributors from the location where the research was conducted who participated in the data collection, design, analysis, and/or interpretation of the work.": Sweet, D. (2022, February 1). The inclusion and diversity statement – one year on [News from a Publication]. Cell Press. https://www.cell.com/news-do/inclusion-and-diversity-statement-update-2022

See more examples in the paper cited below:

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