Diversity Patrol Scanning Citations For Victims

Using teacups and construction paper

Pity me. I just had a paper rejected because, as one reviewer said, “Although your cure for cancer seems genuine, and would likely help people suffering from that dread disease, you did not cite even one black transsexual migrant with an orientation toward minors. And you gave yourself no help at all by being a white man. Therefore I’m recommending rejecting the paper.”

I have to accept this judgement, of course, because The Science is nothing without the voice of genuine perverts, lunatics, and other assorted Official Victims receiving credit. Highlighting their lived experiences must take precedence over all other matters.

So says Nature, the journal of journals, in “Citation diversity statements” (I have corrected their persistent and surprising misspelling of DIE).

Since taking office in January of this year, the Trump administration has taken actions to limit — if not outright dismantle — diversity, equity and inclusion (DIE) efforts in federally funded science and academia in the US. Grants for research that explicitly study DIE issues (such as inequality) or that include a DIE component (such as an explicit aim to test diverse cohorts) have been paused or cancelled¹, and universities have been threatened with losing federal funding if they ‘promote DIE’².

My second sad duty is to report that Trump’s efforts have been largely in vain. It’s true outright demands to DIE have been removed in some grant applications, but the desire to DIE, the need to DIE, and the enforcing of DIE in universities has remained, even strengthened, though renamed by the ladies (biological and spiritual) who run The Science. Hence this new insistence Victims get cited.

In The Science, as elsewhere in the culture, everybody both deserves and must have a trophy.

[C]itations can influence a researcher’s career through speaking invitations, grants, awards and promotions. Thus, representation in reference lists has important consequences for representation in science: if citations are systematically biased against, for example, female authors⁴, then female authors will have CVs or grant applications that are less competitive than those of their male counterparts. Moreover, a systematic citation bias against women means that the field is not properly benefiting from their scientific contributions.

This is a clear indication that women are not at least a two-to-one majority (defined as “Equity”) in a few remaining departments (like Math), and a signal that that must change.

That Nature editorial pointed as inspiration to the peer-reviewed paper “The extent and drivers of gender imbalance in neuroscience reference lists” by, inter alia, Jordan D. Dworkin, who I couldn’t help but wonder if he was related to the she-beast Andrea Dworkin. But as it seems impossible she could have mated without her man first draining the Jamesons’s distillery dry, and since we have not heard reports of this, his hername (no Enlightened person uses surname today) must a coincidence. The paper was in Nature NeuroTheScience.

The paper reports on the alarming rise of women-authored and -led papers in gray-matter journals. “Across these five journals, the overall proportion of articles that had women as first or last author increased from 36% in 1995 to 50% in 2018”. That was seven years ago. Could be as much as 100% by now.

Yet if even one white man remains on top (or, curiously, at bottom) in an author list, a great injustice would still be with us. How do we prevent this tragedy? By citing the unable. It is your duty, Dworkin and pals argue, to seek out Victims and put their names in your papers.

Actually, I’m not sure what their point is. Their paper is littered, positively festooned, with wee Ps, confidence intervals, and strange statistical terms. Counting all the women and Victims in papers and citations must have made them go goofy. Here’s an example (which you don’t have to read):

My eyes didn’t glaze over trying to read that. They threatened to jump out of my skull. (Ban P-values.)

But then came the easy-to-understand picture, which I promise came right out of the paper. Something about picking papers by “random-draws models”. Papers go into coffee cups and pretty ladies in dresses reach in an grab out slips. Or something. It is not clear, at all, why.

I wonder if the ladies made colorful cardboard slips with paper names on them just like this in their takeout clear plastic organic salad bowls, put gold stars and glitter on Victim ones, and made an afternoon of playing with “random draws.” And not drawn by “pretty ladies” neither. They are forbidden in academia. Probably they used ugly grad students.

Anyway, men are bad, White men especially so, responsible for “many imbalances”. Like men being better at math and then writing papers proving it. Shockingly rude of them. Not to say misogynistic (shouldn’t that be misterogynistic?).

“Addressing the identified imbalances will require researchers, particularly men, to make use of available resources and engage in more thoughtful citation practices.”

Consider this article one man addressing it.

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