‘Citation is [...] memory. Citation is how we acknowledge our debt to those who came before; those who helped us find our way when the way was obscured because we deviated from the paths we were told to follow’ (Ahmed, 2017, pp. 15–16).

One of the defining features of academic writing is the practice of authors to reference, cite or allude to the work of other academics. Known as intertextuality – every academic text once written becomes part of a complicated labyrinth with other texts (Orr, 2011) – this practice of citation is a form of respectful acknowledgement. It acknowledges the contribution to knowledge that others have made and reflects the extent to which academic ideas are not shaped in splendid isolation but are always based on and emerge through interaction with others. It is not only the work of academics that carry a citation. Experts, practitioners, policies, artists and others who comment in the public space may also find their words taken up, amplified and included in whatever academics are writing. 

As has been pointed out in the section about asking research questions, the literature you engage with shapes what is accepted as the evidence base for your research project. It has the capacity to determine priorities in your field of interest. 

In the video below, Professors Carol Azumah Dennis and Jenny Douglas talk about their own experiences as academics of citational politics.

Transcript (55.9 KB) .

Beyond this, citations matter in academic writing as they confer mutual credibility. They demonstrate a degree of respect for the person whose work is being cited while also demonstrating that the person who does the citation has read widely, is familiar with the literature surrounding a subject and is respectful of the intellectual labour the success of their own academic work depends upon. The inverse of this is also important here. The absence of a citation implies that the work of particular writers is of little value, need not be read and does not make a worthwhile contribution to our understanding of the world. It implies that the excluded writers can be ignored. So stark is the potential for unfair exclusion that it might reasonably amount to academic misconduct. 

It is worth noting here that citation sits alongside co-authorship in equitable approaches to undertaking research. An expansive concept of authorship includes more than the person who has penned words on a page or screen. The Open University’s Research Code of Practice offers guidance on Authorship, Acknowledgement and Attribution. It defines authorship as being directly involved in the creation of a work (Open University, Research Code of Practice, p. 18) by:

Being solely responsible for, or making a significant contribution to, the conception/design of the project, or the collection, analysis and/or interpretation of the data on which the work is base or... Making critical, intellectual input to the writing or revision of the work/research output.

There are more formal reasons why citations matter. The absence of a citation reflects on the writer and may imply misconduct or other unethical activity. To use someone’s ideas without acknowledgement is a form of erasure. When Spivak (2010) asks ‘can the subaltern speak?’, there is a parallel question – will those in positions of power and authority hear? 

Sara Ahmed (2017) writes about this in evocative terms. According to Ahmed, citation is a form of memory. It is how we as writers acknowledge ‘our debt to those who came before; to those who helped us find our way [...]’. She compares our citations to bricks, the materials from and through which we create our intellectual home, our spaces of belonging, re-energisation and sanctuary. In her book, Living a Feminist Life, Ahmed (2017) adopts a strict citation policy. In doing so she is mindful that while it may seem that citation is an important practice based solely on the value of ideas, inequity as much as the credibility of ideas influences who gets cited in academia. At the University of Texas, Christen Smith (who started Cite Black Women) writes about ‘citation, erasure, and violence’. She suggests a structural relationship between gender violence and citational erasure. In the context of a memoir in which her work was plagiarised and her attempts to protect her intellectual property belittled, she makes it clear that citation is not a simple technical matter. Citations are the rules, practices and beliefs that define the geological map of our thoughts and inspirations (Smith, 2022, p. 207). But, despite the inevitable and inextricable intertextuality of academic writing, choices are made. It is impossible to fully annotate an encyclopaedic account of every text we engage with, or reference all of those whose ideas have propelled us along a particular line of flight. We can never acknowledge in their fullness all the allusions, resonances and hauntings that stride through our work. Thus, citation is a deliberate political act – it is a decision to accept particular authors as foundational to our work, or of critical importance to our field of study. In this, your choice is to either challenge or reinforce citational privilege.

Smith (2021) adds a welcome empirical base to this notion of citational privilege. She identifies citations as a site of struggle for gender – racial justice. With Dominique Garrett-Scott she outlines the politics of citation in anthropology. The figures are stark. In looking for the rates of citation of Black women academics in top-tier journals, she notes that while Black women made up 2.6% of US anthropologists, they represented 1.5% of total citations. As part of their extensive research, Smith and Garrett-Scott (2021) note that 1.5% citation amounted to 82 (out of 5,445) citations. Of these 82 citations, 47 citations were by other Black academics. This was the case even though those Black authors accounted for only three of the 61 papers analysed. Thus, Black authors accounted for 5% of papers examined but 57% of the citations of other Black authors. In summary, 100% of the Black authors whose work was examined cited other Black authors, compared to 29% of non-Black authors. 

There are numerous studies that exemplify and analyse the erasures and exclusions Christen Smith and Sara Ahmed refer to above. What is important here is not to evidence further citational inequality and their impact but to consider ways in which this inequality may be interrupted. 

Intervention that may help counter citational inequalities

John Horton and Peter Kraftl (2009) invoke the concept of ‘implicit activism’ – seemingly small actions which have the potential to be ‘politicised, affirmative and potentially transformative, but which are modest, quotidian, and proceed with little fanfare’ (p. 21).

The gender, disability or ethnicity of authors is not always clear when reading a text. One way to make the invisible slightly less obscured is to use first names in references and/or intext citations. The citation of female authors is rendered more (though not completely) visible. 

Connected to this, a researcher may wish to analyse their citations as closely as they can in terms of location of corresponding author, and gender if the name allows (it does not always). To revise the literatures you cite to be more inclusive is not synonymous with reducing either the credibility or quality of your work. 

As Christen Smith suggests: Cite Black Women. 

You may consider including a positionality statement in your text, one that locates you with the nexus of citation and perspectives. All the authors of this series of articles have included positionality statements as part of their institutional biography.