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Article History

Accepted: 14 June 2023

First Online: 16 August 2023

Declarations

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: The authors have no relevant financial or non-financial interests to disclose.

: Recent work in several fields of science has identified a bias in citation practices such that papers from women and other minorities are under-cited relative to the number of such papers in the field (Bertolero et al., ; Caplar et al., ; Chakravartty et al., ; Dion et al., ; Dworkin et al., ; Fulvio et al., ; Maliniak et al., ; Mitchell et al.,; Wang et al., ). Here we sought to proactively consider choosing references that reflect the diversity of the field in thought, form of contribution, gender, race, ethnicity, and other factors. First, we obtained the predicted gender of the first and last author of each reference by using databases that store the probability of a first name being carried by a woman (Dworkin et al., ; Zhou et al., ). By this measure (and excluding self-citations to the first and last authors of our current paper), our references contain 33.11% woman(first)/woman(last), 12.76% man/woman, 32.8% woman/man, and 21.34% man/man. This method is limited in that a) names, pronouns, and social media profiles used to construct the databases may not, in every case, be indicative of gender identity and b) it cannot account for intersex, non-binary, or transgender people. We look forward to future work that could help us to better understand how to support equitable practices in science.