This project report provides an overview of a citation justice project developed at the University of Victoria Libraries, a Canadian academic library, as part of a broader library initiative aiming to address inherent biases within traditional scholarly publishing and academic research practices. Leveraging the unique position of libraries and information specialists as partners in the research process, this report details the steps undertaken, lessons learned, and future plans for advancing critical citation and inclusivity in academic scholarship.
There is a growing movement committed to the values of equitable and just citation, but the material practices of altering citational politics are more challenging. For instance, researchers in the Global South are under-cited, but how many citations are enough to correct this bias? How do we best determine when an author is from the Global South to begin with? We present a case study where social and natural science researchers (the authors) spent years engaged in the material practices of citational politics at the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR). Our findings show that there were notable changes at the individual and collective levels as participants tried to change the status quo, and we use Gloria Anzaldúa’s pathway to conocimiento as an organizing framework for explaining the process of unlearning and learning that occurs through engaging with citational politics. The pathway moves through seven non-linear stages on the way to conocimiento: (1) arrebato/the rupture, when the reality of citational politics is fully understood; (2) liminal space, characterized by more questions than answers; (3) a retreat to pre-rupture/arrebato politics in the face of difficult ideas (backsliding); (4) the crossing, a step in ethical learning that moves the learner from thinking to action; (5) creating new stories where new individual and collective norms emerge; (6) the clash, a stage where these new norms clash against the status quo again; (7) and finally chores, the mundane, regular practices that maintain an amended status quo. Our analysis of the process is designed to both support citational politics practices in particular and provide a framework with examples of how to facilitate and anticipate changes in engaged, collective social change work in general.
This piece unfolds as a multi-voiced dialogue among members of a co-lab who work as scholars, artists, dancers, professors, and storytellers and span diverse disciplinary homes including sustainability, art, science and technology studies, and life sciences. We position citation as a practice of community accountability, aesthetic expression, resistance to erasure, and care for knowledge lineages. We ask: Who are we accountable to when we cite? What does it mean to be in right relationship with our sources? How do citations enact care, reciprocity, and community? In our discussion of disciplinary and epistemological borders, we challenge academic conventions around what counts as knowledge and who counts as a knower, especially highlighting the need to cite Indigenous scholars not only when writing about Indigenous knowledge, but in honoring contemporary, place-based intellectual contributions. In our discussion on canon, we interrogate academic genealogies, metrics of influence, and the mechanisms by which expertise is legitimized. We propose alternate genealogies—such as "mother texts" and "grandmother texts"—and dream of visualizing non-traditional citation trees that encompass lived experience, artistic practice, and kinship with mentors, collaborators, and co-thinkers. Ultimately, this dialogue invites an expansive view of citation as world-building. Critically, this piece uses Chicago-style footnotes to engage with citational politics in dialogue and form: One of the co-authors engages with the dialogue post-hoc through the footnotes, and we use the footnotes to reveal the writing process and editorial review. Rather than merely naming sources, we reflect on what it means to be in conversation with them—across time, space, and medium. Through this piece, we aim to model a citational practice rooted in relational ethics, joy, complexity, and critique.
This teaching reflection shares experiences of teaching citational politics in the context of a PhD course titled Writing as Thinking: Experimenting and Working with Writing as Knowledge Practice. It describes course content, and in particular the kinds of discussions that arose when students and teachers engaged with ideas of citational justice. Based on these experiences, I make two suggestions: first, that we should not consider citation practices (and their politics) in isolation, but rather as one aspect of the intertwined set of practices that comprise scholarly writing more widely; and second, that if we care about citational politics we should also seek to diversify the nature of what is accepted as "academic writing."
Being provided with the source of a scholarly product (book, data, document, etc.) used in a published work is an important aspect of communication in the scholarly world because it allows the author’s peers to verify the results presented therein. Until recently, inconsistency, idiosyncratic practices, and a lack of explicit standards have been the dominant characteristics of the history of supplying bibliographic information for a publication mentioned. This essay uses Robert K. Merton’s (1910–2003) well-known paper “Science and the Social Order” (1938) as a case study to illustrate how “deficient” bibliographic referencing hampers the research process. The long-standing absence of norms regulating source referencing information was gradually reversed during the twentieth century, when sets of formalized and standardized rules were put into place and codified as the new millennium approached–especially with the advent of digital technology. This article examines the variegated ways in which bibliographic material was provided (or not) and suggests how a convergence of factors put an end to this “disorderly” bibliographic sourcing environment.
