The giant plan to track diversity and reduce bias in research journals
In the next year, researchers should expect to face a sensitive set of questions whenever they send their papers to journals, and when they review or edit manuscripts. More than 50 publishers representing over 15,000 journals globally are preparing to ask scientists about their race or ethnicity — as well as their gender — in an initiative that’s part of a growing effort to analyse researcher diversity around the world.
In the absence of data, some scientists have started measuring for themselves. Computational researchers are scouring the literature using software that tries to estimate racial and ethnic diversity across millions of published research articles, and to examine biases in who is represented or cited.
The effort to chart researcher diversity came in the wake of protests over the killing of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, by US police in May 2020. That sparked wider recognition for the Black Lives Matter movement and of the structural racism that is embedded in society, including scientific institutions.
Cultural understanding of race and ethnicity differs by country: social categories in India or China, for instance, are different from those in the United States. The historical associations of asking people to disclose these personal descriptors pose another set of problems, and could, if not sensitively handled, intensify concerns about how these data will be used.
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