Editorial: Why Nature is updating its advice to authors on reporting race or ethnicity
There are many important reasons to study race or ethnicity. People of colour are affected by discrimination in education, at work and elsewhere. These situations need to be — and are being — studied, so that problems can be better understood and solutions can be found.But there are instances in which a focus on race or ethnicity as an explanation for an outcome can be inaccurate, and has the potential to be harmful.
So, what are we asking authors to do, if their research describes people according to race, ethnicity or other socially constructed categories? Essentially, three things. First, specify the categories used and explain why such classification is needed.
Explaining methods of classification is important because race and ethnicity are not fixed categories, and there are many proxy measures for them. For example, one increasingly common method is to train machine-learning algorithms to assign people’s race according to their names. Such categorizations can be inaccurate because they reflect naming conventions, rather than having anything to do directly with a person’s heritage.
The research enterprise is on a path towards stopping discrimination and ensuring equity. In updating our advice, we areon this journey. Overall, we all want authors to think harder and more carefully about these issues. The advice we’re announcing this week, and our existing measures, are intended to uphold the highest possible standards of rigour and accuracy in research.
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