In Blog

The importance of diversifying citations

A News article in Nature (Kozlov, 2022) highlighted an important issue: research from the global South is largely ignored. In the article, Kozlov raises the concerns of African researchers whose work on monkeypox and warnings of rising cases had been uncited and disregarded. Now that the world is facing a monkeypox outbreak that the World Health Organization’s Director, Tedros Adhanom Gebreyesus has called a “public health emergency of international concern” (WHO, 2022) those African researchers’ work is getting attention.

The need to diversify our reading and to decolonise research is exposed by the current monkeypox public health concern, but the issue is not new. Boyes (2019) illustrated the problem dramatically when he used the Worldmapper (worldmapper.org) tools to re-draw a map of the world, or cartogram, where regions are scaled according to the number of research articles used in public health teaching. Notably, Africa was almost non-existent on the cartogram, which was dominated by the United States of America, the UK and Europe. Not only does this practice limit our knowledge and understanding of emerging health challenges, but it also impacts on how we apply the findings from research carried out in very limited geographic and cultural spaces. The cultures of Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) nations (Heinrich, Heine, and Norenzayan, 2010), responsible for most of the social, behavioural and scientific research cited and applied, are very different from the cultures of the rest of the world. As the consequences of anthropogenic accelerated climate change are becoming more apparent, it is vital that we acknowledge and respect research from around the globe if we are to be prepared for the challenges and mitigate the risks of the hazards we will face.

Why is research from the global South largely disregarded? It might be argued that the knowledge generation is imbalanced so that output from the global North dominates. Czerniewicz published an article in The Conversation (2015) where she addressed the very unequal nature of scientific knowledge creation and exchange, using data of numbers of research papers published by region to draw a very similar looking cartogram to that of Boyes (2019).  Until very recently when China overtook the United States of America in producing the most cited papers in the period 2018-2020 (Brainard and Normile, 2022), most knowledge had been generated (and cited) by researchers in the United States of America, the UK and Europe. However, another factor that contributes to the narrow citation of research works is perhaps driven by the need for rapid dissemination of research findings and work pressures: researchers cite the work of other researchers they know, know of, have met at conferences, collaborate with, have previously cited, or whose work was cited by someone else. This is something we can overcome by broadening our reading lists and research networks; becoming uncomfortable in new situations; fostering true collaborations of researchers in WEIRD with researchers in non-WEIRD countries. We need to face global challenges as a global community. Our challenge begins with reading and citing work from people outside of our current networks, and preferably from a non-WEIRD country.

Laura Roden, PhD

References

Boyes, 2019 (https://realkm.com/2019/12/13/new-initiatives-begin-decolonising-research-libraries-and-knowledge-systems-but-what-about-decolonising-km [15/08/2022]

Brainard, J., Normile, D (2022) China rises to first place in most cited papers. Science 377, 799 doi: 10.1126/science.ade4585

Henrich J, Heine SJ, Norenzayan A. (2010) The weirdest people in the world? Behav Brain Sci. 2010 Jun;33(2-3):61-83; discussion 83-135. doi: 10.1017/S0140525X0999152X. Epub 2010 Jun 15.

Kozlov, M. (2022) Monkeypox in Africa: the science the world ignored Nature 607, 17-18 doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-01686-z

Czerniewicz, L. (2015) It’s time to redraw the world’s very unequal knowledge map. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/its-time-to-redraw-the-worlds-very-unequal-knowledge-map-44206

WHO (2022) WHO Director-General’s statement at the press conference following IHR Emergency Committee regarding the multi-country outbreak of monkeypox – 23 July 2022 https://www.who.int/director-general/speeches/detail/who-director-general-s-statement-on-the-press-conference-following-IHR-emergency-committee-regarding-the-multi–country-outbreak-of-monkeypox–23-july-2022