Earlier: NATURE MAGAZINE: Tackling Systemic Racism Requires The System Of Science To Change
From Nature:
The giant plan to track diversity in research journals
23 February 2022
Efforts to chart and reduce bias in scholarly publishing will ask authors, reviewers and editors to disclose their race or ethnicity.
Holly Else & Jeffrey M. Perkel
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. Publishers say that this information, gathered and stored securely, will help to analyse who is represented in journals, and to identify whether there are biases in editing or review that sway which findings get published. Pilot testing suggests that many scientists support the idea, although not all.
The effort comes amid a push for a wider acknowledgement of racism and structural racism in science and publishing — and the need to gather more information about it. In any one country, such as the United States, ample data show that minority groups are under-represented in science, particularly at senior levels. But data on how such imbalances are reflected — or intensified — in research journals are scarce. Publishers haven’t systematically looked, in part because journals are international and there has been no measurement framework for race and ethnicity that made sense to researchers of many cultures.
Brazil’s way of thinking about racial categories is quite different from America’s, while France and Germany are averse, for anti-Nazi reasons, to collecting race and ethnicity data. But in the long run, America’s intellectual framework on race will no doubt get imposed on the rest of the world because that’s just the way things work: the rest of the world eventually surrenders to America’s most self-destructive ideas.
Another problem nobody has even begun to think about is what is the base rate? If a paper published in America lists as its authors 20 whites, 10 Asians, and 1 African-American, are the Asians overrepresented because they only make up 6% of America’s population? Or are they underrepresented because they make up approaching half of the world’s population? Are blacks underrepresented because they make up 12-14% of America’s population, or are they appropriately represented if they make up 3% of the Ph.D.’s in the field?
… 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. …
“It is never too late for progress,” says Joel Babdor, an immunologist at the University of California, San Francisco. In 2020, he co-founded the group Black in Immuno, which supports Black researchers in immunology and other sciences. It urges institutions to collect and publish demographic data, as part of action plans to dismantle systemic barriers affecting Black researchers.
For example, one way you could show you aren’t as racist as your rivals are is by adding the name “J. Babdor” to your list of authors. Just a suggestion … Indeed, you can ask J. Babdor for a list of other names who also need to Publish or Perish to add to your publications.
“Now we want to see these efforts being implemented, normalized and generalized throughout the publishing system. Without this information, it is impossible to evaluate the state of the current system in terms of equity and diversity,” the group’s founders said in a statement.
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. …
… The American Geophysical Union (AGU) in Washington DC, for instance, which is both a scientific association and a publisher, held information about some US members who had disclosed their race or ethnicity. In 2019, researchers used these data to study manuscripts submitted to AGU journals1. They cross-checked author information with the AGU member data set, and found that papers with racially or ethnically diverse author teams were accepted and cited at lower rates than were those that had homogenous teams.
But, but, but I was informed that “Diversity is our strength!” How can this be?
Oh, I know: racism!
But the scientists were able to check the race or ethnicity of author teams for only 7% of the manuscripts in their sample.
… In countries such as the United States, people might be accustomed to sharing the information with their employers; some companies are required to report this to the federal government by law. But in others, such as Germany, authorities do not collect race or ethnicity data. Here, there is extreme sensitivity around racial classification — rooted in revulsion at the way such information was used in the 1930s and 1940s to organize the Holocaust.
In the absence of comprehensive data, many studies in the past decade have used computational algorithms to measure gender diversity. Processes that estimate gender from names are far from perfect (particularly for Asian names), but seem statistically valid across large data sets. Some of this work has suggested signs of bias in peer review. An analysis of 700,000 manuscripts that the RSC published between 2014 and 2018, for instance2, pointed the organization to biases against women at each stage of its publishing process; in response, it developed a guide for reducing gender bias.
E.g., make sure to add the names of more women to your list of authors.
… Other studies analyse citation patterns. For instance, one analysis6 of US-based authors found that papers with authors of different ethnicities gained 5–10% more citations, on average, than did papers with authors of the same ethnicity, a finding that has been interpreted as a benefit of diverse research groups.
Booyah! I told you Diversity Is Our Strength. Of course, it might be that bigger papers with more authors are more likely to have more diversity and more citations.
And a 2020 preprint7 from a team led by physicist Danielle Bassett at the University of Pennsylvania found that authors of colour in five neuroscience journals are undercited relative to their representation; the team’s analysis suggests that this is because white authors preferentially cite other white authors.
So, diversity isn’t a strength here, but that is because White People Are Bad.
Instead of training a classifier, a different idea is to estimate ethnicity directly from census information — although this approach is limited to names from the country that did the census. In January, a team used8 US Census Bureau data to assign US names a probability distribution of being associated with any of four categories: Asian, Black, Latinx or White. The researchers then studied papers by 1.6 million US-based authors, and found that work from what they describe as minoritized groups is over-represented in topics that tend to receive fewer citations, and that their research is less cited within topics.
Since it was revealed unto to us from on high that Diversity Is Our Strength, the fact that The Diverse don’t generate as much value as The Undiverse proves that Systemic Racism is as ineffably pervasive as ether, phlogiston, and miasma.
… Given those complex dimensions, the best option for collecting data is simply to invite scientists to self-identify, says Jory Lerback, a geochemist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who worked with the AGU on its studies of academic diversity.
… In October 2020, The New York Times reported how several US scientists, including Babdor, were unhappy that publishers, despite their commitment, had no idea of how many Black researchers were among their authors.
That same month, Raymond Givens, a cardiologist at Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York City, had begun privately tallying editors’ ethnicities himself. He counted the number of what he classed as Black, brown, white and Hispanic people on the editorial boards of two leading medical journals, The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) and JAMA, after reading a now-retracted article 10 on affirmative-action programmes, published in a different society journal. Givens categorized the editors by looking at their photographs online
As we all know, Race Does Not Exist Scientifically. On the other hand, c’mon, you can tell what race somebody is just from looking at his picture.
, together with other contextual clues, such as surname and membership of associations that might indicate identity, and determined that just one of NEJM’s 51 editors was Black and one was Hispanic.
… Within months, JAMA had become embroiled in controversy after a deputy editor, Edward Livingston, hosted a podcast in which he questioned whether structural racism could exist in medicine if it was illegal.
Sacrilege! How dare a scientist question our holiest article of faith?
More than 10,000 people have now signed a petition calling for JAMA to take measures to review and restructure its editorial staff and processes, as well as to commit to a series of town-hall conversations with health-care staff and patients who are Black, Indigenous and people of colour (BIPOC). Livingston, and Howard Bauchner, the then-editor-in-chief of JAMA, have also stepped down from their posts.
Givens … has continued his work, gathering gender and race data by eye on more than 7,000 editors at around 100 cardiology journals — finding that fewer than 2% are Black and almost 6% are Latinx — and looking at networks between the editors (‘A view of cardiology editors’ diversity’).
“When you look at the networks, white men are central: they are the hub from which all the spokes emanate,” he says.
It’s almost as if white men invented scientific medicine and have done, by far, the most to better the health of human beings.
“Sometimes you really have to shake the system to force it to change. Until you are going to reshape the system, we will still be having this conversation a decade from now.”
When it comes specifically to information on editorial board members, Givens says that’s not difficult to collect — if publishers truly put in the effort. He says it took him only a few months to do it. “It’s just counting,” he says.
… To engage the historically marginalized populations they hope to reach, Lerback says, publishers (and researchers studying how ethnicity affects scholarly publishing) must commit to engaging with these groups beyond simply asking for data. Most importantly, she adds, they should build trust by following up findings with action.
Like giving the researchers sinecures and putting their names on lots of publications.
