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The rise of citational justice: how scholars are making references fairer

An emerging movement aims to push researchers to pay more heed to inequities in scholarly citations.
  1. Diana Kwon

    1. Diana Kwon is a freelance science journalist based in Berlin.

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Daina Berry, Christen Smith and Yasmiyn Irizarry talk in the park.

Anthropologist Christen Smith (centre) at the University of Texas at Austin with her colleagues Yasmiyn Irizarry (left) and Daina Berry. Credit: Montinique Monroe for Nature

Christen Smith was at a conference in October 2017 when she felt a familiar jolt of frustration. A presenter showed a slide with passages that had been paraphrased from one of her books — and, to her dismay, had failed to credit her.

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Nature 603, 568-571 (2022)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-00793-1

Updates & Corrections

  • Correction 06 April 2022: An earlier version of this story erroneously stated that the workshops on citational justice were run solely by Neha Kumar and Naveena Karusala. In fact, they were run by a collective of researchers that included Kumar and Karusala.

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