One tool that scholars use is citation. Scholars cite for a range of reasons. Citations can be used to explain why researchers have undertaken their work (Many studies have examined the effect of exercise on mental health; we look at the effect of weight training on anxiety in particular.) They can link specific studies to larger questions (Our study is part of a broader body of work about the effects of exercise on mental health) or to specific studies on related topics (On endurance exercise and anxiety, see Long and van Stavel 1995). Perhaps most fundamentally, citations can support concrete claims; they make clear where these claims come from, and allow the reader to check their sources (Endurance training has been found to enhance the release of brain-derived neurotrophic factor: Seifert et al. 2009).
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Citations are used overwhelmingly to situate work within an existing literature—usually by indicating acceptance or dissatisfaction with a line of thought. People who understand how citations are used tend to take for granted that citing someone’s work isn’t like writing a personal reference for her, and that citations aren’t meant to model any sort of ideal demographic balance.
Recently, however, a movement has grown up that invites scholars to rethink the way we cite. This movement for citational justice is motivated by three main concerns. First, a concern for distributive justice: the idea that the goods that flow from being cited should be apportioned equably among people of different ethnicities, genders and sexualities. Second, a concern that scholars who have done good work get cited as much as they deserve, even in the face of possible biases (especially against ethnic minorities and women). We call this second concern citational justice as citational fairness. Finally, there’s a concern that individuals who’ve done wrong shouldn’t continue to have a major presence in citations: this takes us into the sphere of retributive justice.
At least two of these concerns are evident in this short talk at the Society for Classical Studies (SCS) annual conference by Professor Sarah Bond of the University of Iowa. The movement has a presence in other disciplines, too: at this year’s American Sociological Association conference, #citeblackwomen was trending on Twitter and the same hashtag appeared in Twitter threads for the American Psychological Association meeting. Bond’s comments provide a convenient encapsulation of the citational justice movement by a scholar who is an influential figure in her field.
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What are the demands of distributive justice when it comes to citations? Should the breakdown of total citations match the demographic breakdown of the local area, the country or the world? Which country should count—the country the piece was written in, published in, or the country the author is from (assuming there’s only one)? Which demographic characteristics should be taken into account—ethnicity and gender, sure, but what about language, religion or political affiliation? And which ethnicities, genders, languages and so on should be on the list? Should this apply to single articles or books or entire careers? If I cite more black women in one piece, can I cite more white men in another?
Then there’s the problem of determining which demographic categories scholars should be included in. A scholar’s sex or ethnicity may not be obvious. Determining in which category to put academics with sex-ambiguous names like Hilary Putnam might not take much time, but it will take some, time that will be multiplied by a large number of citations. The case of trans academics like Deirdre McCloskey raises further complications, since works they produced while they identified as one sex may be deemed to be more or less deserving of citational justice than other works produced by the same person. Ethnicity can be an even more slippery notion: how do we decide which categories we place scholars from the past in, especially when the categories we’d prefer to use don’t line up with the way they thought about themselves?
The image comes to mind of a bird slowly circling in the sky, then going faster and faster as the circle shrinks, until finally with a pop, the bird disappears with only a few feathers floating down from the sky. Something like that happens at the end of this article, where a revolutionary concept emerges.
There is an alternative attitude to citation: one we call citations as citations. This ideal (the traditional approach) involves scholars citing works they think are helpful to the inquiry they’re engaged in. They may find them helpful in providing background; in linking their writing to other specialist literatures; or in allowing readers to double-check a claim.
One key feature of this approach is that citations are not viewed as anything else. This relieves students and scholars of having to come to a comprehensive moral judgment about every scholar they cite. It absolves them of the statistical analysis they might otherwise be under pressure to do in order to ensure that their citations match the demographic distribution of whichever country they happen to be in. And it allows them to focus entirely on a task that has brought great benefits to all – the task of growing knowledge.
?And do they also divorce themselves. ?Do they then need to go to court to adjudicate what goes where (we do, after all, seem to go to court for all manner of silliness).
