Maintaining your voice as an underrepresented minority during the peer review process: A dialogue between author and mentor

Abstract

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Black women in medical education publishing: Bibliometric and testimonio accounts using intersectionality methodology

“…How do Black women experience authorship in medical education and how can we ensure that they do not feel, as Johnson did when she went through the publishing process, that “’ you are not enough,’ ‘your story is not enough,’ ‘your voice is not enough.’”? 45…”

“…14 Yet a growing body of literature in academic medicine suggests that Black women may have particularly difficult experiences with the publishing process. For instance, two recently published commentaries point to the vulnerability scholars of color may experience in the peer-review process: comments from reviewers may express bias when authors reveal their identity, 15 and this can lead Black women authors to feel like their story is “not good enough.” 4(p145) Editorial leaders in medical education are starting to talk about and try to address the bias baked into the publishing process, 16,17 but we still know little about the actual representation of Black women in the medical education literature. We know a bit more about the overall state of Black women in science: a 2022 study of inequalities in scientific publishing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that Black and Latine authors were underrepresented overall and that Black, Latine, and white women were underrepresented in the fields of physics, mathematics, and engineering and were more overrepresented in lower-cited fields.…”

“…3 Some Black women scholars are starting to speak out, specifically about their experiences of discrimination in academic publishing, a critical component of academic career progression. [4][5][6] Their stories argue for the experiential significance of this discrimination, but as a field steeped in quantitative methodologies and a postpositivist desire for generalizability, statistical significance is an important aspect of arguing for change. 7 Current literature has used quantitative methodologies to explore author gender, 8,9 but it has not done the same for race/racism (following Gilborn and colleagues, we are "ambivalent" about race: it has very real effects but they come through mechanisms of racism; we denote this by using these two words together).…”

Putting on academic armor: How Black physicians and trainees take stances to make racism visible amidst publishing constraints

“…Mentoring Author 1 has allowed me to use academic spaces to bear witness to her experiences of racism, disrupting these spaces along with her. Yet I continue to commit racist microaggressions against her 2 , so I see Author 1’s lens as having primacy in this work. Moreover, as a linguist, I believe in the power of language to oppress and to free, so I approach research through the lens of language.…”

“…Simply, I have failed to recognize scholarly publishing as a values-laden system, which privileges those that share a background and approach mirroring my own. The opportunity to publish Authors 1 and 3’s commentary 2 in which they share their personal reflection on publishing, raised my awareness of scholarly publishing’s norms and motivated me to collaborate on this research.…”