Racial and ethnic imbalance in neuroscience reference lists and intersections with gender

Abstract

Discrimination against racial and ethnic minority groups exists in the academy, and the associated biases impact hiring and promotion, publication rates, grant funding, and awards. Precisely how racial and ethnic bias impacts the manner in which the scientific community engages with the ideas of academics in minority groups has yet to be fully elucidated. Citations are a marker of such community engagement, as well as a currency used to attain career milestones. Here we assess the extent and drivers of racial and ethnic imbalance in the reference lists of papers published in five top neuroscience journals over the last 25 years. We find that reference lists tend to include more papers with a White person as first and last author than would be expected if race and ethnicity were unrelated to referencing. We show that this imbalance is driven largely by the citation practices of White authors, and is increasing over time even as the field diversifies. To further explain our findings, we examine co-authorship networks and find that while the network has become markedly more integrated in general, the current degree of segregation by race/ethnicity is greater now than it has been in the past. Citing further from oneself on the network is associated with greater balance, but White authors' preferential citation of White authors remains even at high levels of network exploration. We also quantify the effects of intersecting identities, determining the relative costs of gender and race/ethnicity, and their combination in women of color. Our findings represent a call to scientists and journal editors of all disciplines to consider the ethics of citation practices, and actions to be taken in support of an equitable future.

Factors That Influence Career Choice among Different Populations of Neuroscience Trainees

“…This analysis cannot determine directionality of this association, but the relationship is likely complicated-that is, experiences and perceptions in graduate school influence publication rate and career interests (Fisher et al, 2019), while career interests in turn may influence publication rate. There is also evidence of systemic bias within publishing, as women are consistently underrepresented in scientific journals as authors, in citation counts, and in reference lists (Caplar, Tacchella, & Birrer, 2017;Dworkin et al, 2020;Larivière, Ni, Gingras, Cronin, & Sugimoto, 2013;Shen, Webster, Shoda, & Fine, 2018), and white authors are over-represented among citation lists (Bertolero et al, 2020). Journals are increasingly turning towards new models to address these findings, such as double-blind review (Bernard, 2018) and inclusion and diversity statements for journal submissions (Sweet, 2021).…”

Drug-resistant focal epilepsy in children is associated with increased modal controllability of the whole brain and epileptogenic regions

“…Recent work in neuroscience has identified a bias in citation practices such that papers from women and other minority scholars are under-cited relative to the number of such papers in the field. 62,63 Here we sought to proactively consider choosing references that reflect the diversity of the field in thought, form of contribution, gender, race, ethnicity, and other factors. First, we obtained the predicted gender of the first and last author of each reference by using databases that store the probability of a first name being carried by a woman.…”

Integrating reward information for prospective behaviour

“…Here we report the predicted gender and ethnicity of authors in our reference list (Ambekar et al, 2009; Bertolero et al, 2020; Dworkin et al, 2020; Sood et al, 2018; Zhou et al, 2020). First, we obtained the predicted gender of the first and last author of each reference by using databases that store the probability of a first name being carried by a woman.…”