For many of us, the reference list we assemble at the end of a paper is one step above an afterthought: generated by citation management software, hopefully formatted correctly by the same. For me, the exception occurs if my paper exceeds the page or word limit for a journal I’m targeting. To avoid cutting precious text, I’ll comb through my citations, trying to find places where I could use one instead of three, getting rid of less-than-crucial examples, excising the “see also” and “e.g.” In a low moment a few years ago, wrestling with an unwieldy reference list, I actually tried to convince myself that nobody really needs their middle initial. That was when it dawned on me that citation is not a neutral practice. Collectively, our choices about who to include and exclude, and how and why, shapes our literature: who counts in it, and how much.
Other folks got the memo before me. A number of studies show that citations in political science journals tend to underrepresent female and minority scholars (Bruening and Sanders 2007; Dion et al. 2018; Dion and Mitchell 2020; Teele and Thelen 2017) as do journals in other disciplines (Bertolero et al. 2020; Caplar et al. 2017; Chatterjee and Werner 2021; Dworkin et al. 2020; Maliniak et al. 2013; Odic and Wojcik 2020; Roberts et al. 2020; Wang et al. 2021). This phenomenon appears to be driven by some combination of:
- Historical path dependencies (foundational works produced at a time when academia was less diverse) (Dion et al. 2018);
- Women being less likely to submit to journals (Bruening and Sanders 2007; Djupe et al. 2019) and/or more likely to leave academia (Dion and Mitchell 2020; Teele and Thelen 2017; see also Dorenkamp and Weiß 2018);
- Male authors being more likely to cite themselves and women being more likely than men not to cite their own work (King et al. 2017; Maliniak et al. 2013);
- Males (Dion and Mitchell 2020; Caplar et al. 2017; Chatterjee and Werner 2021; Dworkin et al. 2020; Maliniak et al. 2013; Wang et al. 2021) and mixed-gender teams (Dion et al. 2018) being more likely to cite male authors;
- Undercitation of qualitative work more likely to be produced by women (Teele and Thelen 2017);
- All-male author collaborations (Teele and Thelen 2017); and
- White authors being more likely to cite white authors (Bertolero et al. 2020; Smith and Garrett-Scott 2021).
Building a diverse, equitable, and vibrant community of policy scholars requires that we try to mitigate these biases. But how? Fundamentally we need major changes in how we train, hire, and support scholars, so that academia welcomes rather than erects barriers for women, minorities, non-traditional and first-generation scholars, and other groups subject to discrimination and bias. This should be shared goal we all strive to achieve. A small but actionable step forward is to consider explicitly the composition of our reference lists and, to the extent we find gender or racial imbalances, make a conscious effort to cite more scholarship by women and underrepresented minorities. We encourage all PSJ authors to take this step. Some tools to help in that assessment include:
- https://jlsumner.shinyapps.io/syllabustool/
- https://github.com/kalimu/genderizeR
- https://www.r-project.org/nosvn/pandoc/gender.html
- https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/wru/index.html
- https://genderize.io/
- https://github.com/ElsevierSoftwareX/SOFTX-D-21-00198
- https://github.com/appeler/ethnicolr
PSJ has taken another small but nonetheless important step. In 2021, we stopped counting reference lists in the overall word count for an article. Limiting reference lists may cause authors to sacrifice newer scholarship, which may be produced by diverse scholars, in favor of older, core scholarship produced by less diverse authors. Our continuing aim is to eliminate this incentive.
Are there other steps that you would like to see PSJ or other political science or policy science journals take to encourage diversity, equity, and inclusion in our scholarly community? Do you have recommendations for how we as individual scholars can tackle this charge, or how we should approach it when acting collectively? We’d love to hear your thoughts.
-Gwen Arnold, Associate Editor
Policy Studies Journal Blog 