Citational Justice

"Citation justice is the act of citing authors based on identity to uplift marginalized voices with the knowledge that citation is used as a form of power in a patriarchal society based on white supremacy." (Gammons, 2023)

It aims to recognize and appreciate the work of authors who are Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color (BIPOC), disabled, queer, and/or of other marginalized identities. This practice requires effort from the researcher to find, read, and cite works from authors with marginalized identities because the marginalization has included systemic and systematic exclusion from the literature so far. 

It is also known as citation politics. 

Why is this important?

Hunt, Riegelman, and Myers-Kelley (2024) state:

Citation bias is the tendency for researchers to cite investigations that show a positive effect and/or cite articles published in preferred journals due to familiarity. There has recently been significant discourse on how citation bias impacts racialized people and female-identifying scholars. Not only does citation bias harm racialized scholars, but it also hinders scientific progress. One method to mitigate the problem is to issue a Citation Diversity Statement, a short paragraph included before the references section of an article where the authors consider their own bias and quantify the equitability of their reference lists. Additionally, an anthropologist who studied the Cite Black Women movement wrote about antiracist citational politics and praxis and makes the following (and more) suggestions:

• Look online to see how authors self-identify
• Make a spreadsheet to identify your own citation trends
• Be explicit that citing racialized scholars is valuable and central
• Read promiscuously, critically, and counter the observed inequities
• Look outside of academic books and articles (scholarship of racialized people has been historically excluded from those venues)

There is a long history in the U.S. of research atrocities committed against racialized people (e.g., UMN land grab, U.S. Public Health Service Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male: 1931-1972, forced sterilization, intellectual property claims). Medical Apartheid is a book detailing how Black people have been non-consensually used at a disproportionate rate compared to their white peers for painful and dangerous medical experiments, but the Black population benefits minimally from the medical gains. Equally important is to acknowledge current medical racism (e.g., pharmacy deserts, Dr. Susan Moore’s death due to COVID, prison experimentation). This has led to an understandable and justified distrust between racialized people and researchers/institutions. Additionally, research studies tend to emphasize the perceptions, thoughts, and interests of white people, widening disparities in research outcomes and impacts. The strategies below are designed to decenter whiteness, think inclusively, and build trust between researcher and communities of color when conducting primary research.

Learn more

Methods & Resources

Reading Materials

Affinity Groups Method

One convenient (depending on the field) method for finding authors of color and other underrepresented voices is to look for affinity groups and search for the members’ names on PubMed (PubMed Guide) and/or other biomedical literature databases for their publications; here is the A-Z list of health sciences databases; and the Health Sciences Library Toolkits will likely be easier to use because each provides a shorter list of databases, select the toolkit that best fits your research question, not your academic program. 

Example

As an example of an affinity group that may help you find more research from surgeons of color would be the Society of Black Academic Surgeons. I found it by searching Google for black women in surgery club, if I were to continue looking, I would want to expand the search (using Google Tips) to include society/societies and association(s), etc. My revised and expanded search would maybe look like black women|men|trans surgeon club|society|association. This could also expand beyond surgery with surgeon|physician|doctor|researcher etc. or narrow down by specifying the type of surgery. Please note that I’m using the bar symbol to tell Google that these are synonymous terms (the bar is found on the backslash key above the Enter key on a Windows keyboard). 

If the member list is publicly posted, you could search our biomedical databases for their names, separating each name with the Boolean operator OR (learn more about Boolean operators and structuring a search). If the affinity group has a list of recommended reading or lists members’ publications, I would look into those. You can also look into the coauthors on these articles and researching whether they self-identify as being part of an underrepresented group when deciding whether to cite them. 

The following communities can be starting places for discovering more authors. This list is certainly not exhaustive; if you know of a health sciences community that should be considered for this list, please let us know! 

Citation Snowballing or Tracking

Once you find an article that cites authors of color or attempts to conduct anti-racist research, look into the articles and authors they cite for more works. Web of Science (WoS) has a great tool for tracking citations; learn more via the WoS Guide. Please note: WoS does not index every journal available (nor does any database), so some citations will not be found in WoS and you may not be alerted to those missing citation connections unless you are cross-referencing with the paper's bibliography. 

Because individuals with minoritized identities tend to recognize the harm done by the dominate group, often you'll find many more citations of other people of color in their bibliographies than you will within the bibliographies of white, able-bodied, neurotypical, etc. authors (this is not always the case, but serves as a helpful method for finding more authors of color and varied ability, gender and/or sexual identity, etc.). 

Networking

Ask your network whose research they're following. Learn more:

Keeping Up

Once you've found authors to follow, learn how to keep up with their work:

Learn More

UW Resources

Once you've found works you would like to cite, it's time to build your bibliography. Citation managers make this process much easier than the days of pen and paper! A citation manager allows you to save resources as you find them, easily insert in-text citations as you write, and automatically populate the bibliography based on your in-text citations. 

The above resource helps you select from the following three free citation managers. Learn more about each tool individually using the links below. 

Citation Styles

While there are many citation styles, the following two are the most commonly used in the health sciences. Explore other citation style guides from the UW or search for citation style handbooks in the UW Libraries Search!