For about twenty years we have seen an increasingly unhealthy obsession among researchers with citing their articles. So much so that some have been screaming “quote injustice” lately! In a 2022 report on the topic published in the journal Nature, we even see researchers wearing a T-shirt that says: CITE BLACK WOMEN. An algorithm was also developed that measures the “fairness” of quotes in articles. It must be admitted that the idea that when choosing which articles to cite should take into account people’s physical characteristics (gender, skin color, etc.), and no longer just interest in the result, seems extremely strange. This fixation on quotes has even encouraged researchers to use them strategically by quoting between complicit groups. To counteract this phenomenon, algorithms try to track down these “quote cartels”!
Since the biggest obstacle to matching quotes to the right person is the existence of homonyms, researchers have also changed the way they identify themselves. In 2009, a radical solution appeared: the creation of a “barcode”, the Orcid (for Open Researcher and Contributor ID), which converts the researcher into a number. This usage still remains very marginal, but is required by certain journals. So I had no choice but to start my own Orcid to publish in certain magazines… And who knows if, given the demands for “citation fairness”, Orcid might not soon require you to state your “gender” and ” Skin color “will demand”?
In my opinion, these excesses and this new obsession can be explained by the multiplication of researchers’ evaluations based on the number of citations as an indicator of “quality”. Since the 17th century at the latest, the act of quoting has primarily had the function of recalling earlier works on a specific topic. Citation is therefore aimed at the results and not at the person, even if, as a sanction of the priority of the discoveries, it also plays an important role in granting symbolic recognition. Thus, in September 1632, Galileo had complained to a friend that the young Italian mathematician Bonaventura Cavalieri, to whom he had communicated his famous discovery of the parabolic trajectory of bodies launched and in free fall, had published this result in his new book it would be It would have been “more polite” to let him publish his volume first… which he didn’t do until 1638! And in the 1770s, the Publications Committee of the Academy of Sciences also required authors to cite what had previously been published on the subject.
Discourses about “citation fairness” take the dominant citation-based model of research assessment for granted
What is striking about discourses about fairness or “citation justice” is that they take the dominant citation-based model of research assessment for granted rather than questioning it. Furthermore, these discourses forget that several material reasons can explain the observed differences in citation distribution: prestige of the home institution, access to high-quality instruments, publication in a less well-known journal, researchers’ lack of interest in certain problems, etc.
In short, rather than uncritically accepting citation as a measure of quality and then imposing quotas on researchers based on gender, race, etc., it is better to avoid these slip-ups and complicate the calculation of citations. For example, by including only the initials followed by the name, or by imitating the major collaborations in particle physics that only provide the name of the group, showing that science today is more collective than individual.