Adding diversity markers eg gender

thelauramay

Hi all,
I've made the decision to include diversity metrics to all papers, syllabuses, panels etc I'm involved with, as well as to my thesis. I'm wondering if anyone has found a way to add additional information to authors, eg gender, geographical region? I saw there have been discussions about institutional affiliations before, and am guessing this is not possible with Zotero at this time. Does anyone have any suggestions?
My ideal (fantasy!) result would be diversity data stored alongside authors in Zotero. Citations and references wouldn't include this data as per style (though maybe down the line...), but it would be possible to somehow generate a report which I would include in the paper.
I realise this is a huge ask, but it's an important one. I'm open to your amazing suggestions!
Thanks so much,
Laura

bwiernik

Not a way to store much extra author details unfortunately. You could perhaps switch to using Jurism, a version of Zotero with expanded legal and multilingual citation features. Jurism includes fields for transliteration of names, which you could perhaps co-opt for this purpose (that might interfere with citations though, not sure). https://juris-m.github.io

You could also store some more coarse information in the Extra field. For example, you could indicate non-male first or senior authors for a paper like this:
Annote: ♀or ⚧

Those could even be included in citations by adding the `annote` variable to a style.

thelauramay

Hey thank you so much for this! I'm going to have a play and see what I can do. I really appreciate your response.

pjweiss

@thelauramay Have you settled on a workflow for this that is working well for you? I agree this kind of data can be very useful. I wish Zotero had records for authors as well as items, then this information could be added once to the author record, rather than to every item they are connected with. (And we could have variant forms of name, etc.) Tags are another possible approach, if you don't go with the Extra field.

thelauramay

Hey @pjweiss , actually I haven't yet had the chance to test it out - at this point I'm planning on figuring it out after the teaching semester is over! I'm going to try what @bwiernik suggested, as it's important for visibility purposes to start showing this info on final published documents, rather than storing the data for my own purposes (tags), especially where I'm producing several items.
I was recently reviewing a book where the author used full names rather than initials in the references, and I thought that was a simple but great approach to rendering gender - and to an extent, ethnicity - more visible.