On Tue, Feb 23 2016, Heather Ford wrote: > There's an interesting discussion going on right now on the Association of > Internet Researchers mailing list about the citing of women (and women of > colour) in academia that I thought might be interesting. The comments are > also really (as Gabriella Coleman noted) 'lively' so they're worth a read > too. I'd be curious to learn more about how we as a Wikipedia research > community fare here too... > > https://merylalper.com/2016/02/22/please-read-the-article-please-cite-women-academics/
Heather, from my perspective that discussion looks mostly like people talking past each other. To recap what I learned: It seems that Fred Kaplan didn't notice a book that might have been relevant to his research and therefor didn't cite it (this is what he claims anyway). When Meryl Alper pointed out the missing citation, he was dismissive rather than appreciative. But she wasn't exactly diplomatic; contact seems to have been initiated from her side as follows: "how come no mention of this claim made prior by @frauricker: http://nyupress.org/books/9780814708675/ …? shame on @nytimes @fmkaplan" - https://twitter.com/merylalper/status/701027695400976384 So it's perhaps not a total surprise that Kaplan was defensive. The bigger picture -- women authors (not) being cited proportionately, or even being actively "erased", as well as broader online sexist behaviour[fn1] -- would be well worth discussing but to me the Frek Kaplan / Meryl Alper debate looks like it is only tangentially connected with the deeper issues. A counterfactual thought experiment: if Stephanie R. Schulte (frauricker) had in fact been male, how would that have changed the situation? I'd suggest we zoom to the "big picture" to get some more context. E.g. «We find that in the most productive countries, all articles with women in dominant author positions receive fewer citations than those with men in the same positions. And this citation disadvantage is accentuated by the fact that women's publication portfolios are more domestic than their male colleagues — they profit less from the extra citations that international collaborations accrue.» http://www.nature.com/news/bibliometrics-global-gender-disparities-in-science-1.14321 With regards, Joe [fn1]: just watched this related lecture yesterday, http://boingboing.net/2016/02/22/sarah-jeongs-harvard-lecture.html _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l