Science should reflect the diversity of our society, but in many Faculties, despite high numbers of female students, women are underrepresented in professorships and are cited less frequently. The IFiF project Diversity-X addresses precisely this issue and has developed an innovative tool that can measure gender diversity, national diversity and the topicality of citations.
The project aims to illustrate why diversity in academia is so important and demonstrates that, whilst female researchers in communication studies publish and attend conferences just as frequently as their male colleagues, they are cited less often, have fewer followers on social media and receive fewer research awards.
The Diversity-X tool developed as part of the project helps to highlight inequalities in citations by using citation analysis to show how diverse a bibliography actually is.
Citing and referencing research in a gender-fair manner helps to bring diverse perspectives into research and, therefore, into society. The objective is to determine the diversity of visibility and citations within communication studies across academic journal articles, conferences and science communication on social media. The tool was developed within the field of communication studies, but is intended to be applied in other fields in the future – particularly in psychology.
