Who's Citing Whom?

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Citational justice

This page discusses how academic and popular writing relate to wider discussions of bias in information sources, primarily through the mechanism of citation. By looking at who an author cites, we learn about their perspective and influences, but who isn’t included can sometimes be just as important as who is. The idea that we can be intentional with who we cite and to what ends is called citational justice. Citational justice is always relevant to any writing project.

Exclusion Through Search Selection

Published information comes in many forms, from blogs and social media posts written with no verification to news media to peer-reviewed journals with elaborate publication procedures. The extent to which a source is fact-checked is what gives it credibility.

At the same time, inequity is built-in to how all sources are reviewed, accepted, published, and cited. This is because every editor and peer reviewer is human and works from their own perspective – this will influence their decisions even without mistakes or deliberate manipulation entering the picture.

In the best of cases, having preferences for who to cite can be a reasonable, explicit decision, based on the intended audience and the point the author is trying to make. However, citation practices frequently end up replicating historical patterns that privilege core texts or clusters of works over others. As feminist Sara Ahmed put it: “I would describe citation as a rather successful reproductive technology, a way of reproducing the world around certain bodies” (2013).

Exclusion in academic publishing

Communities without the resources required to work with complex publication processes can end up excluded from certain venues – for example, academic journals use formatting guides which make some types of “non-academic” sources difficult to include. They can also have high fees associated with beginning the submission process, and their pace of publication tends to be discouragingly glacial. All these factors discourage those already marginalized within academia from participating.

Within academia, power imbalances often appear in citation, where certain groups receive more attention than others. For instance, research shows that men are cited more frequently in social science scholarship compared to women (Pells 2018), and Black women are significantly underrepresented in anthropology citations (Smith & Garrett-Scott 2021). These issues extend across various disciplines, highlighting a pervasive problem that must be addressed.

Part of “exclusion in academic publishing” was adapted from Inclusive Citation by Andrea Baer and used under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 International licence

Citing MMU (multiply marginalized and underrepresented) Scholars by Utah State University Libraries

Privilege and priorities

Popular media like magazines and news sites may not give much attention to unpopular topics, which will not serve their advertisement-based revenue model. Various forms of privilege, for example, financial or cultural, tend to give easier access to connections and steppingstones for publication across mediums and formats. It’s useful to think about how your field has come to define who an expert is and who gets prioritized when discussing a particular topic.

Because many publishers are based in the Global North and wield disproportionate influence in other areas, significant portions of our printed and digital texts foreground white and Eurocentric perspectives (often unwittingly). That Western perspectives tend to be viewed as natural, normal, and objective continues to be an active topic in the history of science and cultural studies (Hofmänner 2020) even as newspapers, magazines, scholarly presses and the media generally do more and more to acknowledge and minimize the effect of such inherited biases.

For example, a recent study found that only 4% of 174 studies correlating access to natural areas to good mental health had been based on surveys outside of Western societies (Gallegos-Riofrio et al. 2022). In addition, disabled people are often excluded from academic and medical research (Inckle et al. 2023) on topics related to disabilities framed by ableist perspectives and are underrepresented in science and academia (Vasquez 2020) overall.

What does citational justice look like?

Citational justice can take many forms beyond citing underrepresented voices, like building new content platforms that serve non-Western knowledge systems more effectively, or giving them leadership roles in existing publishing projects. Being critical, careful, and discerning in reading and writing helps interrogate the biases presented above and can make sure we address the subjective points of view we inevitably are confronted with when we contribute to any discussion. There is no perfectly inclusive information source platform. Which ones you use and how will contribute to shifting or reinforcing the status quo.

So – how do we know what we don’t know, and find what’s not there? This is the challenge.

It’s a structural issue in society and academia, and something to work on collectively. But there are some things individual scholars, journalists, writers, and you can do.

Begin by thinking about where the gaps are in the way any topic is discussed. Consider what the main viewpoints are. What’s missing? Who is concerned by this topic but not represented in your sources? And how could you include historically marginalized points of view?