My recent research suggests that scientific publishing has a persistent pattern. To learn about citations, which refer to academic contributions to previously published research in their papers, my co-author and I examined 8, 000 articles published in the most reliable economics journals around the world. We discovered that lead authors with Taiwanese surnames received on average 14 % fewer quotes than lead-written papers with non-Chinese titles.
This supports previous research in science and other natural sciences, implying that referencing discrimination is a cross-disciplinary issue.
We tested every possible hypothesis to prove our conclusive studies, which also excluded other possible explanations. Our initial impression was that perhaps Chinese-authored documents are less cited and published on average than non-Chinese-authored documents. The reference gap is still present for publications that have been published annually.
Another plausible guess is that Chinese-authored journals are of lower caliber. Some visitors may have heard of China’s “paper factories,” which have recently been producing research documents based on false data for Chinese universities. Some European academics may have become less interested in Chinese study because of this, but these are primarily issues for low-quality journals.
We only looked at articles that had been published in the best journals ( which had 4 or 4 stars in the ABS journal rankings ). Because of the tight editorial review process that frequently takes a few years, high-volume paper mills are less likely to have produced these papers. Furthermore, almost half of the Foreign authors in our sample were affiliated with other countries, but paper-mill accusations against Chinese authors are untrue from our observations.
You might also be wondering if Chinese scholars ‘ documents are less citable because of language barriers in reading. Again, this shouldn’t be a problem when all of these documents have been subjected to rigorous gaze and editorial evaluations. These papers appear to have writers from China who don’t appear to be particularly distinct from those from other countries.
We looked at even more ways to explain the glaring prejudice, taking into account various components, and so on. However, the reference distance persisted and occasionally increased.
We eventually gave up trying to refute the thesis and turned our attention to the causes of this racial discrimination.
Why do economics practice discrimination?
Imagine a small cosmos in the creative market. Based on the authors ‘ stature, the topic’s perceived importance, and the quality of each report, each one is like a globe with its own bulk. The more the planet’s density is increased, the more information is being pushed by gravity, like gravity.
However, gravity even wanes as we move farther, which in this case means not kilometers but culture, such as networks, language, and subtle clues that reveal who feels most comfortable. Perhaps a scholar’s philosophical pull is diminished as a result of how far apart they appear on the social map.
This” cultural range” at work is apparent from our results. The ratio of Chinese-authored sources is considerably higher in Chinese-authored documents than in non-Chinese-authored papers, which is interesting because it occurs in both directions.
We needed to find out who simply is discriminating, so we moved on. We identified four” suspects”: readers of journals, readers of reviews, publishers, and, enfin, readers of journals.
If book readers were to start publishing articles of comparable higher value than the ones they published, they should only be publishing articles from Chinese authors. If so, you do anticipate that these excellent documents may be cited more, not less, which may conflict with the information.
In terms of readers, the majority of publications use a “double-blind” process, in which the reviewers and the writers don’t know each other’s identities. Reviewers may be discriminated against on the basis of nationality if they don’t know when they’re dealing with a Foreign writer. In the same way, publishers are typically not permitted to make journalistic judgments, so they cannot be discriminated against.
This leaves the authors as the primary arbitrators, those who read scientific journals and use their own writing as references. We compared three groups of groups to get a clearer understanding of what is happening:
- Foreign and non-Chinese
- best economists versus non-top economists, and what are their positions?
- those who attend US universities and those who don’t.
We came to the conclusion that non-Chinese leading economists from non-US organizations are the least likely to quote authors with Taiwanese surnames. Given the US’s conflict with China, it seems odd, but it is really a result of nature. You may believe US economists to use studies about China, which are primarily or most often done by Chinese authors, to examine their biggest rival.
reducing the bias
Co-authoring with a non-Chinese academic is one way to lessen the” Chineseness” of authorship. A reference rule applies in academic writing, though, that only the first artist ( who is also the lead researcher ) can be identified with a paper that has more than three authors. For instance, Zhang, Smith, and Armstrong’s document may simply be called Zhang et al. in 2025. ( 2025 )”. Thus, it will not matter if there are more researchers from other countries.
The result author’s affiliation with a US institution is another way to muddy” Chineseness.” This significantly lowers the reference discrimination, according to our study. But, it’s not always possible to get such a US associations.
This led us to the conclusion that reducing the author’s info in citations is the best way to reduce prejudice. For instance, journals can ask for citations to be made using initials ( “BG 1957″ ) or numeric codes ( 1, 2 ) as well as market leaders like Nature. Journals may also employ the digital image identifier” 10.1234/example” as well. content” rather than mentioning the authors in published works.
This may not solve the issue of not being cited in the first place, but it may help to lessen the risk of cited bias as users no longer have access to the papers ‘ surnames.
Self-sabotage is bias. Every day we disregard a paper because the nickname comes off as “foreign,” we put a stop to our own progress. This stifles discussion, slows understanding, and causes the world to become less and less interested in ideas.
Peng Zhou is an economics teacher at Cardiff University.
The Conversation has republished this post under a Creative Commons license. Read the original post.