Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

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.

    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed  Google Scholar

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.

Access options

Rent or buy this article

Get just this article for as long as you need it

$39.95

Learn more

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

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.

References

  1. Rossiter, M. W. Soc. Stud. Sci. 23, 325–341 (1993).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Ferber, M. A. & Brün, M. Fem. Econ. 17, 151–158 (2011).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Caplar, N., Tacchella, S. & Birrer, S. Nature Astron. 1, 0141 (2017).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Dworkin, J. D. et al. Nature Neurosci. 23, 918–926 (2020).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  5. Teich, E. G. et al. Preprint at https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.09047 (2021).

  6. King, M. M., Bergstrom, C. T., Correll, S. J., Jacquet, J. & West, J. D. Socius https://doi.org/10.1177/2378023117738903 (2017).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Bertolero, M. A. et al. Preprint at bioRxiv https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.10.12.336230 (2020).

  8. Kozlowski, D., Larivière, V., Sugimoto, C. R. & Monroe-White, T. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 119, e2113067119 (2022).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  9. Milard, B. & Tanguy, L. J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol. 69, 1380–1395 (2018).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Dworkin, J., Zurn, P. & Bassett, D. S. Neuron 106, 890–894 (2020).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  11. MacLeod, L. KULA https://doi.org/10.18357/kula.135 (2021).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  12. Postle, B. R. & Fulvio, J. M. J. Cogn. Neurosci. 34, 1–3 (2021).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  13. Koning, R., Samila, S. & Ferguson, J.-P. Science 372, 1345–1348 (2021).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

Download references

Subjects

Latest on:

Nature Careers

Jobs

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing

Search

Advanced search

Quick links