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Article History

Received: 6 June 2024

Accepted: 10 October 2025

First Online: 24 November 2025

Declarations

:

: The authors declare no competing interests.

: Recent work has identified a continuing bias in scientific citation practices such that papers from women and other minority scholars are under-cited relative to the number of their papers (see, e.g., the discussion in 42 ). We proactively aim to consider choosing references that reflect the diversity of the field in thought, form of contribution, and different aspects of identity. As one effort in this direction, we used a publicly available code 43 to estimate the gender identities 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. By this measure, our references (excluding self-citations to any of the authors of the present paper) contain 13.7% woman(first)/woman(last), 9.4% man/woman, 20.7% woman/man, and 56.2% 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 (see 43 for concise discussion of the limitations of this and similar methods). We look forward to future work to help all of us better understand and implement equitable practices in science.