A call to eradicate non-inclusive terms from the life sciences.
other · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 33556000.
- Also identified by DOI 10.7554/eLife.65604 and PMC identifier 7870137.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Since the Black Lives Matter movement rose to mainstream prominence, the academic enterprise has started recognizing the systematic racism present in science. However, there have been relatively few efforts to make sure that the language used to communicate science is inclusive. Here, I quantify the number of research articles published between 2000 and 2020 that contained non-inclusive terms with racial connotations, such as "blacklist" and "whitelist", or "master" and "slave". This reveals that non-inclusive language is being increasingly used in the life sciences literature, and I urge the global academic community to expunge these archaic terms to make science inclusive for everyone.
Medical subject headings
- Biological Science Disciplines
- Racism