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Abstract
Citations are not just a way to acknowledge a person's contributions to research. Because funders and universities commonly consider citation metrics when making decisions about grants, hiring and promotions, citations can have a significant impact on a scholar's career, says Cassidy Sugimoto, an information scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. Initiatives include computer code that helps academics to estimate the balances of gender and race in their papers' reference lists, a push for 'citation diversity statements' in research papers, and websites dedicated to highlighting papers from under-recognized groups. Over the past decade or so, bibliometric assessments have shown how citation rates for men are, on average, higher than those for women across a wide range of fields, including economics2, astronomy3, neuroscience4 and physics5 - even when controlling for other factors that might influence citations, such as author seniority, or the year or the journal in which a paper is published (see 'Overcited, undercited'). The team inferred these authors' gender and race or ethnic origin from their names, using data from sources such as the US Census to assign each name a probability distribution of belonging to different categories.