Aaron Sibarium writes for the Washington Free Beacon about one leading scientist’s response to a top journal’s unscientific practices.
Nature Reviews Psychology, an imprint of the prestigious Nature publishing group, announced in October that it was “explicitly encouraging” authors to include a “citation diversity statement” in their articles. The statement would affirm that they had made an effort to cite from “a diverse group of researchers” and acknowledge “citation imbalances” based on race and gender.
“[R]esearchers can move scholarship away from narratives that perpetuate societal biases by writing inclusively,” an editorial in the journal read. “[W]e hope that encouraging authors to think about citation diversity will prompt them to engage in concerted and sustained efforts to educate themselves about the relevant work of underrepresented scholars.”
The policy was the last straw for the renowned chemist Anna Krylov, a professor at the University of Southern California and a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, who wrote an open letter to Nature stating that she would no longer engage with the group’s journals.
Krylov grew up in the Soviet Union and has been warning about the politicization of science since 2021. In her letter to Nature, she said that the journal had “institutionalized censorship,” “sacrificed merit,” and “injected social engineering” into the publishing process, citing a litany of diversity policies that were “antithetical to the production of knowledge.” As a result, she said, “papers published in Nature journals can no longer be regarded as rigorous science.”
The Washington Free Beacon spoke to Krylov about her decision to boycott Nature and the state of science more generally. During the interview, which has been edited for length and clarity, Krylov discusses how Nature’s DEI policies resemble Soviet efforts to control science, why sexism is no longer a big problem in STEM, and why the Trump administration’s cuts to science funding are, as she puts it, a “mixed bag.”
