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Inclusive Guidelines for Scholarly Publishing: Recent Style Guidelines for Wording and Imaging
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Inclusive Guidelines for Scholarly Publishing: Recent Style Guidelines for Wording and Imaging
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Segment:0 .
Hi I'll quickly introduce the speakers today. You'll find their full bios online, so I'm simply going to mention how they're involved in developing recent guidelines for language and imaging. I'm Patti Baskin. I'm the executive editor of The five neurology journals published by the American Academy of neurology, and I represented the Council of Science Editors on the four disk steering committee at the time that we developed the guidelines for inclusive language and images from C4 disk.
And so I was the liaison to that workgroup that developed the language guidelines last fall. Emily ayoubi wave is the director of the APA style at the American Psychological Association. She directed the revision of the seventh edition of the Publication Manual of the APA after establishing their first APA style unit in 2015. Sabrina ashwell next is senior copy editor of Chemical and engineering news, the independent news organization of the American Chemical Society.
She chairs the team that created the ACEs inclusivity style guide, and she also contributed to the guidelines on inclusive language and images in scholarly communication from C4 disk. Annette Flanagan is executive managing editor and Vice President of editorial operations for Jama and Jama network and Executive Editor of Jama evidence, and she is an author of the am manual of style and helped develop its recent guidelines on inclusive language for race and ethnicity, and sex and gender.
That's the quick introduction. Um, so in the past few years, several major style guides have been developed, including the C4 disk toolkit guidelines on inclusive language and images in scholarly communication. The am manual of style guidance on inclusive language for reporting race and ethnicity and guidelines on sex and gender. The American Chemical Society inclusivity style guide and the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association.
The representatives I've just introduced from these organizations will discuss the general principles for creating inclusive communication guidelines, methods for development of the style guides, major recommendations and plans for gathering feedback and updating as language and societal norms change. The aims are to point scholarly publishers to these and other resources to embrace and advance equity and inclusion in scholarly publications, and to set industry standards for inclusive writing habits in research and publishing.
I will open by talking first about C for disk and his guidelines. But before I get started, do you all want to come up? There are some seats up here on the about three here in this row, three in the next row. And a couple more further on, give you a chance to get seated. Hey, great.
Still got a few front row seats. People coming in. All right there are a couple of front row seats up here for those just coming. C4 disk believes that organizations and individuals working together can achieve goals more quickly through collaboration and sharing of ideas and resources. So in this session, I'm going to talk about the mission of C4 disc, introduce our toolkits for equity, and give a brief overview of how the guidelines on inclusive language and images came to be, how it is structured and just a few highlights.
C4 disk was founded in 2017 by these 10 trade and professional associations that represent organizations and individuals working in scholarly communications. We now have over 100 additional consortial members and industry partners. And afterward you can ask me about how to become a member of one of those types of members. Um, in our overall goal is to increase diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility in scholarly communications while valuing differences, welcoming diverse perspectives, learning from different communities, making space for marginalized voices, eliminating barriers and serving as allies.
We can do this by providing education and tools that members and partners can use within their own organizations. Individuals and organizations can contribute to the work of fordisc by joining as members or partners and volunteering their time through our working groups. Individuals are invited to join via general call for volunteers and working groups are announced on our website and through our social media accounts.
The projects may involve market research, communications, training on or discussing best practices or working on our tool kits. So we've published four toolkits to this point the anti-racism toolkit for allies, the anti-racism toolkit for organizations, the anti-racism toolkit for black, indigenous and people of color and more. Most recently, the guidelines on inclusive language and images in scholarly communications.
And all these can be found at the fordisc website. There's a tab. Toolkits for equity. And then we have two more that are coming and are currently being developed. Accessibility is planned to be published for early to mid summer and then building and peer review will be is planned for summer or early fall. So the latest toolkit published is the guidelines on inclusive language and images in scholarly communications.
So I'll just touch quickly on what these are. The need for them, the intended audience, the content, how they were created, the various sections, and how we intend for them to be used. So the guidelines document is a global tool. It's an educational resource and a living archive to help all authors, editors and reviewers recognize the use of language and images that are inclusive and culturally sensitive.
The address conscious and unconscious bias in publishing scholarly research. And they aim to set industry standards that promote inclusive writing habits. The guidelines are a living archive to be updated over time that will link to current literature on the topic and other community specific inclusive language guidelines. who are they for?
The guidelines document can be used at various steps of the scholarly publishing process. Authors can use the toolkit when preparing and writing their manuscript for publication. Editors and reviewers can use it when assessing manuscripts at peer review to help flag issues around tone, language and images and suggest more inclusive alternatives. It can also be used by publishers as a resource to ensure their publishing content processes, policies and environment are inclusive and respectful and by scientific associations and societies for language on websites, meetings, marketing and promotional materials and in various ways for writing and communication is involved.
The toolkit includes 12 topical sections, including 10 language sections with two separate sections for images and data visualization. And each of these has a resource list. So most of the sections include a descriptive summary recommendations of terminologies for use or to avoid, and links directing you to relevant literature, resources and other existing guidelines. And the plan is to update each of the sections annually with new recommendations and more references and resources.
So who created this? The guidelines are a true collaborative effort. The working group consisted of 30 colleagues working in the scholarly communication industry, and this included people from associations, from publishers and academic institutions, from various places all around the world. The process after the call for a working group members and selection of the team.
The team chairs develop the team roles for the working group and organize the members in a long Excel table. These roles included project managers, the research team, the writers, editors, designers, proofreaders. Each role was described in detail. And of course, you all know that nothing like this is simple. All this is complicated and time consuming. For example, the writing involved input from researchers and stitching together sections and reviewing multiple drafts and adjusting for uniform tone of style and having external people read and give feedback.
The project managers worked out the timelines for each group to get their work done, and after the writing was finished, everyone used a Google Drive folder for collaboration. We brought in a designer and collaborated with the pub pub staff to post the guidelines online. So here are the 10 language sections that we ended with. All of the sections emphasize that inclusive language, acknowledges diversity, conveys respect to all people, is sensitive to differences, and promotes equal opportunities.
Tips that resonate across all these sections include using first person first language only, including details that are relevant and being specific. Allowing people to self identify whenever possible and considering whether anyone has been left out. Each of these sections contains tables recommending inclusive terminology and terms to avoid and their own specific reference sections. And then there are the two image sections.
Inclusive images and data visualizations show ways to intentionally include a variety of people and to portray people respectfully. They show marginalized people and active, strong roles and not defaulting to showing those who have historically held power in society. They make recommendations for how to represent data by choosing colors, shapes and words to help people connect with the data and to avoid amplifying biases.
The guidelines also include a resources section, which is the most living portion of the toolkit. This comprehensive section includes over 100 links to various resources separated into categories such as tools, images, general language guidelines and topical guidelines. As more guidelines are created by various communities, the list will serve as a living archive. And an index to help users find current and relevant resources.
The working group encourages the scholarly publishing community to suggest new references, recommendations and resources just to help us grow the archive. We have committed to updating the guidelines so that they will stay current and we're currently creating an ongoing work group. To do this. Suggestions that you have can be sent to C4 disk at gmail.com. I'll just mention quickly a couple of examples of one of a language section.
And one of an image section. Both are shorter sections. The shortest sections, I think. And I've chosen those just in the interest of time. So an example of a language section is age discrimination against older adults has received more research than other age categorizations, but is not the only kind of ageism. Ageism includes adultism, which discounts children and teenagers.
The guidelines suggest avoiding assumptions regarding age and stereotypes. The section discusses avoiding age discrimination by suggesting including age, only when it's essential to the context. There is a long list of terms to avoid, to prevent stereotyping, reframing, aging, and asking people to self identify and then terms to use informal research, for example, using specific age ranges and then a section with references.
In the inclusive images section intentionally includes talks about intentionally including a variety of people and seeks to portray people respectfully and disrupt stereotypes. There's a list of varying characteristics to include in images for instance, age, race, gender, disability, hairstyle, skin tone, et cetera. And then there's a list of image banks with images that show diversity and inclusion.
Also included are a number of various aspects to consider. For example, who is in a position of power? What is the environment? And then, of course, there is a list of resources. Um, just a quick note about how we suggest you use the toolkits. These are training materials to help transform workplaces and organizational cultures. They're intended for educational use, not as legal advice.
And they're published under a cc-by-nc share, like 4.0 license. They're free to copy distribute in any medium, reformat build upon to reflect specific contexts or organizations, just as long as there's appropriate credit and links to the license. No commercial use is allowed. I worked with our society to create a derivative language guide for the staff to use in our communications.
It's now going to all of the editors of our journals. It's more concise than the four disk guidelines takes out a couple of the sections. For example, we really don't use immigration or religious terms, and also we added to some sections, for example, the health section where we added neurologic specific terms that are used commonly by our staff. Users can support the guidelines by using them in their organizations and work promoting them at their own events and most importantly, helping us improve the guidelines.
The guidelines will continue to expand and evolve along with ever changing language, and we invite you to join us in improving them and also to join us in our other future initiatives at fordisc. So thank you very much. And I am going to turn the podium over to Emily. Thank you, patty. And I should reiterate that we have seats in the front, so please come and rest your feet if you're so inclined.
I'm Emily ayubi and I will be discussing inclusive language and imagery from the perspective of the American Psychological Association and APA style. So to begin, here is a history of inclusive language efforts at APA. Apa has been publishing guidelines for written scholarly communication since 1929, but it wasn't until the late 1970s that formal efforts began to instruct researchers to avoid bias in language.
This began with guidance to avoid sexist language such as he to refer to a generic person. In 1983, APA added more guidelines about avoiding racial and ethnic bias, which was brief and primarily focused on not generalizing and stereotyping groups of people. Today's bias free language guidelines originated in 1994 with the fourth edition Publication Manual and were revised with the fifth and sixth editions in 2001 and 2009.
The current version of the bias free language guidelines was published in 2019 with the seventh edition Publication Manual also in 2019. Apa established the equity, diversity, and inclusion office or Ed office, as part of its commitment to systematically and institutionally examine, acknowledge and dismantle racism and other forms of destructive social hierarchies such as sexism, ableism, ageism, heterosexism, classism and religious bigotry.
In 2021, APA published the inclusive language guidelines to augment the bias free language guidelines. The inclusive language guide addresses additional terms as well as in-person communication and is designed to be more frequently updated. And these guidelines also help to fulfill the APA strategic objective to share Ed knowledge with industries in disciplines outside psychology. We expect the next update to be published later this year.
So next, I'll describe how inclusive language guidelines are developed at APA. The guidelines STEM from research with real people who tell us what language they want others to use when referring to them. People share their lived experiences with psychologists and representatives of advocacy organizations through research and feedback. Researchers then publish the findings as psychological science in journal articles and books.
Committees of experts then distill that research and feedback from the public and create summary guidance for each topic. Then the APA style team and the Ed office use their subject matter, expertise and writing skills to refine the guidance from the committees and also consult with additional subject matter experts, resulting in the bias free and inclusive language guidelines which are published by APA.
In between formal revisions, the teams meet to discuss interim feedback and plan for new updates. The guidelines are also freely available to everyone with links included in subsequent slides. Our guidance on inclusive language is meant to be a living and evolving document that responds to changes in society. Your and others responses to the guidelines further inform their development for the future, so please feel free to reach out with your feedback and know that it will be evaluated by our teams of experts.
So the bias free and inclusive language guidelines were developed with the help of many committees and advocacy groups that are listed here. We have infused this into our daily work and collaborate with hundreds of experts who both represent and work directly with these populations. We also consult published guidance from other organizations and advocacy groups, but these are the organizations, divisions and societies that we work directly with to provide input as well as review our draft guidelines.
To read the bias free language guidelines, check out the Publication Manual or the concise guide to APA style or scan the QR code on the screen to read the guidelines in full on the APA style website. There you'll find specific guidance and examples about seven different topic areas age, disability, gender, race and ethnicity, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status and intersectionality.
The section on intersectionality is rooted in Dr. Kimberly Crenshaw's seminal work. In addition to serve our global community of APA style users, we have worked with international publishing partners to translate the publication manual, including our bias free language guidelines into seven languages thus far, including Spanish, Portuguese, Greek, turkish, traditional Chinese, simplified Chinese and Japanese with more languages to follow.
The inclusive language guidelines are also published on apa's website and serve as a supplement to the bias free language guidelines. You can read them in full on the APA website linked to here. In contrast to the bias free language guidelines, the inclusive language guide is only published online and thus is designed to be more frequently updated to include more terms as language evolves and people have questions and to address in person as well as written communication.
The inclusive language guidelines are structured as a glossary to help people easily identify terms and learn how to use them. The topics covered in the inclusive language guide include general terms related to equity and power, such as cultural humility, allyship and privilege, person first and identity first language identity terms for the seven topics covered in the publication manual, avoiding microaggressions and conversation and language that doesn't say what we mean.
The next edition of the inclusive language guide will also include advice regarding neurodiversity, pregnancy, body size and religious discrimination. So this is our framework for structuring our guidance on inclusive language, psychological science and work with real people creates the foundation for our general principles for using inclusive language on which reside. The specific recommendations regarding language used for various topics.
Although the specific recommendations change over time in response to societal changes, and although people may disagree on specifics, the overarching goal is to be as inclusive as possible with your language choices. Because inclusive language affirms and values the human dignity of others, even as terminology changes. Our guiding principles of inclusion and respect prevail. So as previously noted, APA has provided guidance on inclusive language to people writing in the field of psychology for more than 40 years.
More recently, apa's efforts have expanded so that we're reaching more people around the globe, including millions of students, educators, researchers, editors and publishing professionals in disciplines beyond psychology, including nursing, education, business and more. Our guidance is backed by science on how to write and speak about others with dignity and respect. As a result, when we use language that includes people, we are better able to affirm, celebrate and appreciate different people in all aspects of our lives.
So the first general principle for avoiding bias and being inclusive is to describe people at the appropriate level of specificity. That means to focus on relevant characteristics, characteristics. The most general. And inclusive terms can refer to anyone. Words like person, individual or human. Relevant characteristics of specificity will be guided by the nature of your research and/or the research you are publishing.
As an example, one way to be more specific is by describing age. In addition to age, it may be relevant to also report, for example, gender. The second principle for avoiding bias is to be sensitive to labels by calling people what they call themselves or what they want others to call them in cases of discrepancy. The best way to know what somebody wants to be called is to ask them.
However, that's not always possible. So if you're writing about groups of people, you can consult the APA style guidelines and other resources that are linked at the end of this presentation, or check with advocacy groups. If you have questions about what terms to use. The two kinds of language used with labels are person first and identity first language. For example, person first language gives us constructions such as person with substance use disorder instead of, for example, substance abuser.
In contrast, identity first language uses an adjective before the noun, for example, blind person or autistic person. Apa's policy is that both person first and identity first language are approaches that are intended to respect disabled people. Therefore, it's acceptable to use either approach unless or until that a group prefers 1 over the other, in which case always use the preferred approach.
In addition, the level of disability identity integration is often predictive of whether a community will use identity first language. That is, when people understand a disability as being inseparable from who they are. They are more likely to use identity first language. For example, many deaf people capitalize the D in deaf and use the word deaf in an identity first way rather than saying people who are deaf with a lowercase D or people with hearing loss.
However, person first language may be more suitable for people with other disabilities, such as person with Down syndrome. In addition, the word disabled should not be perceived as negative or pejorative. Therefore, use the term disabled person or person with a disability, but in general, avoid nouns and language that perpetuates stigma or stereotypes.
Likewise, avoid euphemistic language such as special needs or differently abled, and also avoid fatalistic language such as wheelchair bound confined to a wheelchair or stroke victim. Instead, it's wheelchair user or person who had a stroke. Conversely, don't make the leap from portraying people with disabilities as incapable or as victims by using patronizing language such as you're such an inspiration, remember that people with disabilities or disabled people are real people who have real preferences for how you refer to them.
So pronouns are also vitally important to discuss gender with inclusivity. When discussing specific people, use their identified pronouns when discussing hypothetical or generic people or people of unknown gender. Use the gender neutral pronoun singular. They APA unequivocally supports the use of singular they in writing. We do not recommend recasting sentences to avoid its usage.
The singular they has been used for hundreds of years in literature and is widely used in everyday speech. Furthermore, supporting the use of singular they in scholarly writing helps move thinking away from a gender binary and toward more inclusivity. So I briefly COVID guidelines for age, gender and disability. When speaking about the general principles. But here's a snapshot of additional specific guidelines by topic.
But please note that this is not at all comprehensive. We have the guidelines in full on our website. So another critical component of our Ed framework is accessibility. Apa is committed to ensuring accessibility for all users. In addition to ensuring that our APA style resources are accessible, we also work with accessibility experts to ensure that APA style itself and the editorial guidelines therein are compliant with web content and accessibility guidelines or wcag level AA standards.
And then when it comes to best practices for inclusive imagery, a key starting point is to have a solid sense of your organizational values, your intended audience, and your content to ensure that the images you use reflect those values in content. And equally, it's as important to avoid bias and images in the same way that you would avoid bias in language.
Do not choose images that perpetuate stereotypes about different groups of people. Keep in mind that stereotypes can be negative or positive. So be sure that you're showing people in typical life situations as long as that's relevant to your organizational values and content. This reinforces that there are many ways to be human. So to avoid making the audience think of a specific person, you may want to choose images without people or in which people are not the focus.
And then to conclude, I wanted to reinforce that we have made these guidelines available for all and encourage you to consult and use them with appropriate attribution and with links back to these original sources. So please stay in touch with the APA style team. Check out our guidelines on our website, visit our blog and social media, including our newly launched YouTube channel, and send us your thoughts and questions on inclusive language or other aspects of APA style to style.
Expert at APA org. Thank you. And now I will pass it on to Sabrina. Hello, my name is Sabrina ashwell and I'm going to talk about the ACEs inclusivity style guide, which is a guide on inclusive language and images from the American Chemical Society. My role is senior copy editor of Chemical and engineering news or CNN, the independent news organization of ACEs.
I also chaired the team that created the ACEs inclusivity style guide, and I continue to play a key role on that team. And as Patti mentioned, I contributed to the C4 disk guidelines as well. So I have a perspective from both a contributor and a leader of these types of guides. First, I wanted to give some background on ACEs and how the guide came about. ACEs is a nonprofit, member based professional society with over 173,000 individuals in our global membership, community diversity, equity, inclusion and respect, or I is a core value of ACEs.
In one of our strategic goals is to embrace and advance inclusion in chemistry. To help meet this goal in 2021, the Office of diversity, equity, inclusion and respect in the communications division created a joint objective to create a guide on inclusive language and images for society, staff and members. We saw inclusive language and images as a key opportunity to help foster a welcoming and supportive environment.
The goal of the inclusivity style guide was to create an easy to use tool that staff and members could use to help make decisions around language and images. The team included people from several departments at ACEs. And having this wide range of people helped us get a view of access needs around inclusive language and helped ensure we had the right mix of expertise to create a guide on inclusive communication.
Used internal resources as a jumping off point. Chemical and engineering news had expanded its section on bias free language in its style guide in early 2021. Cnn's der committee had also created checklists to help reporters, editors, social media users and people choosing art ensure that stories were inclusive and reflected the diversity of the Chemical sciences. Those tools gave us a starting point to expand from. But before starting to expand those resources, we wanted to identify access needs related to inclusive communication.
So we asked several staff members outside our team for input, and we did a brief audit of ACEs materials to identify areas where the language and images could be more inclusive. Once we identified access needs, we had to decide how our guide could meet those needs. We created principles to guide our work. Broadly, we knew the main principles were to support access, core value of diversity, equity, inclusion and respect, and help us meet its strategic goal to create a welcoming and supportive environment.
More specifically, we wanted to create a guide that was authoritative, clear, flexible meaning, widely applicable, easy to find and use and easy to update. I'm going to give an overview of the process and then explain how we implemented our guiding principles throughout the process. So the basic process is pretty simple. We prioritized what to include in the first iteration of the guide.
Did research synthesized that research, decided on the guidelines and then wrote them? The important piece here is the iterative next step, which was getting feedback, revising, and then getting more feedback and revising. To give our guide authority relied on extensive research. We read existing guides, including those by journalistic groups and advocacy organizations.
We also had to look beyond formal guides and read articles by the people we wanted to describe and by experts on inclusive language and images. Examples of some of the groups that influenced ACEs guidelines are on this slide, but this is just a subset. The important piece is to seek guidelines from the people who the language will affect. To make our recommendations as clear as possible.
We decided to provide a background section, recommendation and examples, preferably from published work, so people can see the guidelines put into practice. Here's an example of an entry. This format allows people who want just the guideline to read the recommendation and those who want to understand the why can read the background. An example shows the guideline in practice and following this consistent format throughout the guide makes our guide easy to use and shows a clear guideline.
One of the things that sets our guide apart is that when possible, we include examples from published works to show how real people can put these guidelines into practice. For instance, in our guidelines to recognize intersectionality in body size. We included a quote from a report, and I think these examples help make the guidelines a little less intimidating because they show that people are already putting these guidelines into practice that it is possible to do what we're saying.
We also wrote our guidelines so they could be applied to a wide variety of material. And many recommendations include discussion of the nuance around when to use certain language instead of creating a list of words to use and not use, which can oversimplify a complex, context dependent decision. We wanted to give people the tools to make informed decisions about communication.
We wanted to convey that there are no universally correct words to memorize. There is only what is more inclusive for a given situation. So in some examples, we would say the most appropriate language will depend on or if your audience is made up of these people, then use these words. And we also give several options depending on different circumstances.
One of our guiding principles was to make the guide easy to access. That led us to put the guide on acs's website at x.org inclusivity guide and make it freely available. And our team really thought through how to make the guide approachable as well. So instead of starting off with right into the paragraphs of recommendations, we have a home page that shows the sections and entry titles to kind of welcome people in to the guide.
To expand our reach. We also included the guide as an open access chapter in ACEs style guide, the ACEs guide to scholarly communication, which is a resource used by students, researchers, educators and librarians. Publishing it in both places helped expand our audience and including it in a wider style guide helped show that this should be inclusive.
Communication should be an aspect of effective communication. It applies to all communicators, and it's not something that should be separate or siloed for just certain people or certain communications. Make the guide easy to use. We worked with the web team to make the guide intuitive and easy to navigate.
We created resources such as tip sheets and practice examples to help people use the guide in their daily work. We also have a change history section so people can see the changes over time. Our aim is for this to help people quickly find what has changed since the last time they read the guide. To make the guide easy to update, we ensured that staff had access to edit the xorg version and we worked with the publications team to be able to send edits throughout the year outside the regular cycle of edits to that guide.
Importantly, we created an update plan before releasing the guide so that we had a structure in place for when to make regular updates and how to make updates that were more urgent and communicating. These plans to the people in charge of the websites really helped us make sure they were prepared for any updates that would come.
Now we'll talk about the guidelines themselves. The guide starts with general guidelines that apply to all topic areas. Then we have recommendations for specific topics and formats. Guidelines for images and a brief overview of major accessibility concerns. Then we have our free resources like the tip sheets that I mentioned earlier. Here are the current topics covered, which can give you a sense of the breadth of the guide.
Our sections on body size forms, job descriptions and images are particularly important because not many inclusive language guides cover those topics. We're continuing to research inclusive communication and update the guide. For example, we're planning to add sections on data visualization and sentence structure and framing. We're committed to continually learning and ensuring the guide remains relevant to users.
These are the general guidelines from the ACEs inclusivity style guide. These apply to all types of content and formats. They are involve a diverse group of people. Be appropriately specific. Avoid labeling people by characteristic. Ask people how they want to be described and respect that decision.
Description include personal information, thoughtfully recognize words that assume a cultural norm. And recognize when to use diverse. The guideline I wanted to highlight today was the one to involve a diverse group of people. We start with this guideline because it gives you a strong foundation to create inclusive communication. Having diverse teams means you get a range of perspectives. You can begin to see how people interpret language differently depending on their experiences.
When we're more insulated and have more homogeneous teams, it's harder to realize the different impacts that language can have. A few notes of caution here. First, when you do approach others for feedback, try not to put people on the spot. Second, because groups have extreme variety. No one person can speak for an entire race, gender or other characteristic.
Third, make a practice of seeking feedback beyond questions of identity. Treat people as full valued members of the team. Also recognize people's contribution, if not by compensation, than by formal or informal recognition at your organization. These are the other general guidelines, and you'll notice some overlap with the guidelines mentioned from fordisc and APA.
In the interest of time, I'll skip describing these, but you can find the full guidelines available on our website at x.org inclusivity guide. I wanted to just reiterate that we're committed to continually learning and recognizes that language and people's preferences change over time. So we will update the guide to make sure that it remains relevant. We also recognize that we're not perfect and everyone, including me, is still learning about how to be as inclusive as possible.
If we make a mistake, we apologize, learn, and try to do better next time, Thank you for your attention. I'm happy to answer any questions at the end and feel free to email me or ISG at assist.org with any further questions.
Hi, everyone. I'm Annette Flanagan, and I just want to recognize the incredible work and leadership of these colleagues. We're all on this journey together, and the work you all are doing is. I'm just so impressed by it. So thank you. Thank you.
My disclosures. The am manual of style is published by Oxford University press. Thank you oup. Am gets a Royalty for that. I do not benefit from that personally financially, but my salary is paid by the AMA, so. Good these are the members of our team.
They represent a wide variety of backgrounds and professional roles manuscript editors, managing editors and physician editors who handle manuscripts. The Jama network has published the am manual of style for 70 years or so. We're in the 11th edition. This is just to show you that starting in 1998, the ninth edition of the am manual of style actually had guidance on respect for persons, particularly with regard to race and ethnicity.
That was our first entry into that area. The 10th edition expanded the inclusive language section. There's an entire chapter on exclusive language and the 11th edition, which was published in February of 2020. And that date's important had a major revision to the section on reporting race and ethnicity. But as you all recall, there was a lot going on in this country at that time, a lot of violence, murder, and that brought our attention to some things that really needed to be changed.
So we actually did our first update two months after this edition was released. This is our process for we had we pulled the committee together. And it took eight months to identify the areas that needed attention and to prioritize them. We revised the guidance and published it as an editorial in February 2020 in Jama. We've never done that before, but Jama has a sort of a big reach, and we thought that would be the best way to get a call for feedback.
And we got a lot. We actually got in writing named criticism assessments, ideas from 60 different individuals and groups with expertise in Ed and reporting race and ethnicity in general. We did additional research, additional revision, and the new guidance was published in August of 2021. At that time, we shared all of the guidance with all of our editors, all of our editorial boards, and we began a three month intense training process for our manuscript editors.
Then we did a post-implementation study of the guidance to see if it had had any effect. These are the key principles. Race and ethnicity are social constructs. I think all know that. We address important sensitivities and controversies related to these terms in medical research and publication, we acknowledge that language and terminology must be accurate, clear, precise and must reflect fairness, equity and consistency.
When reporting on race and ethnicity, I'm mostly going to be focusing on research reporting, but I'm happy to talk about how to deal with this in news or opinion pieces. Reporting in race and ethnicity should not be considered in isolation. As you've heard from the colleagues, intersectionality with social determinants of Health and other factors are very important.
For research articles, who or what classified participant race and ethnicity and the source of the classifications with preprints for self description is emphasized throughout. And the guidance is not final. We've done several updates since the August 2020 and 2021 release and we'll continue to do more. These are the guidance components. We have definitions of commonly used terms.
That was an area we got a lot of assessment. If you actually want to look at maybe some archaic terms, anybody here from merriam-webster? Good so they have some archaic terms. If you want to see an example, we have a good section on concerns and controversies, particularly with algorithms that are used that are probably inappropriately used based on race.
How to use racial and ethnic collective or umbrella terms. And I'll give you some examples. Best practice for capitalizations, for abbreviations, strong guidance for listing racial and ethnic categories in alphabetical order and not order of proportion. So many are by proportion. If you look around this room, you can look at the proportion. You guys can all self-identify, but we can guess that's not the way to do it.
So you want to start with the Asian or African-American or Black and so on. We have guidance on adjectival use and avoiding race and ethnicity as nouns. A lot of discussion on geographic origin and regionalization, and we have examples throughout. So this is an example of a table. Can I have that? Sabrina of a table that we have published.
By the way, this guidance is all freely available. Um, on the Jama website and on the am manual of style. I don't know if you can see this, but it's Jama network.com/pages/inclusive language. So we put together a table of terms to avoid in terms to prefer with some explanation. I very much like what ACEs has done about the rationale for all of that, and we've tried to put that in this table, why we capitalize the terms, be in Black and white.
And we thought long and hard about that. I think AP does not capitalize the W and white, but the rest of us do over here with obvious exceptions. When you're talking about white supremacy or things of that nature, that we list these categories in alpha order, as I've mentioned, and not to use these as nouns. With a lot of debate about the word minority. So we had conflicting guidance from experts on whether the term is accurate, stigmatizing depending on how people identify.
And this applies now not only to race and ethnicity, but to sex, gender, sexual orientation, abilities, disabilities and so on. So we avoid using it. We recommend other collective terms, if possible. Underserved populations. When referring to health disparities among groups or underrepresented populations, the term minoritized or marginalized can be used.
We advise not using the word mixed race now in some databases in some countries, that's a formal term. So if it's used in the database, we just ask it to be defined and we recommend using things like multiracial or multiethnic. This is an area where we probably have a little disagreement.
But just remember, I'm talking about research. So we got guidance that the terms people of color and bipoc are probably not as inclusive as they are intended to be. And if you think about bipoc, there's a natural hierarchy actually in the abbreviation, so we avoid using it. If it was part of a study, if it's a database meta field, we still ask people to explain what those, what those terms are.
And in the guidance, there's reference to people who identify as people who might be included in this group to say why they don't like these terms. And you can read more about that if you'd like. We ran into a lot of other national, very local terms that are used nationally that are not understood internationally. So South African colloids in South Africa and the Canadian visible minority in Canada are terms that are used by government and census and employment issues.
There's a reason for it. When we see these in manuscripts and we do, we ask the authors to identify who is in that group. And you can see here in one example admixed African individuals or Canadian census categories of Arab Black Chinese. And you can read the list here. And then we don't use the term. As best we can.
And so far, authors have been really, really good about that. When we ran into the South African colloids example, we actually talked with the managing editor of the South African medical journal and said, we're not comfortable with this term. And she said, oh, we don't use it either. So the government does. But the word other. So this is a thing we need to really improve on.
So for now, if the word other is used, we require and it's usually in a table, it's everybody and then this other and it's usually because the numbers are relatively small and they're trying to show some particular difference. We ask them to define everyone that's included in other I would like another word than other. And if anyone has one, please let me know because I don't think the word other for obvious reasons is a good term either.
We suggest avoiding collective reference to racial and ethnic groups as non-white. You don't know who that is. We want it expanded. We have similar concerns about dichotomized comparisons between only two racial or two ethnic groups. What we particularly see are Black versus white. You could say, among Black and white people who identify.
But versus is not a good way to explain that at all. We then I just hit something. I'm good. I'm good. Thank you. OK, so I will just say, if you Google Jama Network Open may 12th and my name, you will see a formal apology that we published because authors didn't get this right in a research letter which has limited number of words.
It was a study of an antidiabetic drug for people with chronic kidney disease, and it was comparing these two groups and it was based on a clinical trial. And in the methods it says, and we did this because it was based as a secondary analysis on our protocol. So when I went to look at the tweet, I saw that and I thought, I guess this is going to be OK, but I missed that they had verses in the Title I of the reviewers had recommended because of the word limit that the authors would reduce the length of their introduction.
They took out sentence one, which was the framing, which explained why they were doing this comparison. So Twitter went crazy, as you would imagine. So there's the apology, and that's my recommendation. We're not perfect. We're all learning. When we don't get it right, we should just tell everyone. And that's what we've done.
And we corrected the article with the authors fully on board. I mentioned that we did an assessment of whether or not we thought there would be an impact. So we looked at three, three month periods, one a year before the guidance, one right before the guidance was released, and then about six months after the guidance to allow time. And we looked at what was being reported, where in the article race and ethnicity were being reported, the number and order of categories, if other was used, was it defined, and was race and ethnicity itself defined in the methods section?
We had 249 articles in 3 journals. Higher percentages reported study participants, age and sex and gender, which is not surprising. Roughly 87 to 100% reporting of race and ethnicity improves slightly from 57% to 67% But this was not statistically significant. So we have work to do, and there was almost no change in the reporting of socioeconomic status, which is very much where we have some work to do.
These were the three areas where we found differences. The categories were being defined in other they were being presented in alpha order, probably Thanks to our manuscript editor who were asking the authors to do that during editing. And there was indication of how race and ethnicity was determined. The main takeaway point here is in the last bullet here that socioeconomic status variables are still way underreported.
And when we get into intersectionality, this is going to be very important. How am I doing on time? Too good. Great so these are the other major areas in the inclusive language section. We are now just completing the draft of the revision on sex, gender identity, sex and sexual orientation.
We thought long and hard. We looked at APA and we've combined sexual orientation used to be separate. We're we're having trouble. So it's together. It's under review. And I'll give you just a couple of things about it. This is our current guidance. It's probably pretty obvious to you all.
The last bullet is something we've dipped our toe into how we're dealing with pregnancy. So we are using terms, pregnant participants, pregnant individuals, pregnant patients. Most of the authors are OK with this. Some of them hate this. And we are very respectful of cultural issues. So in a paper from Iran, this may not work. They may have to actually use a feminine term to explain this, and we're OK with that if that's what the authors need.
These are the components of our guidance. You can read the slide here to see what we're going to be looking at. And we are looking for volunteers. If you consider yourself an expert in edi, particularly in the areas of gender, gender, identity, sex and sexual orientation, just shoot me an email. My email is at the end of this slide and we'd welcome you just quickly.
I'm not going to spend time on these, but I want you to know that we have developed guidance ground up. Leading from the middle, I think was a book that we heard about yesterday. So our multimedia and social media teams developed very specific guidance for using inclusive language in audio and video interviews. And you can see this is actually based on our guidance in general what to do if you're a host, how who you're going to pick to be the host, who you're going to pick to be the interviewee or interviewees, making sure there's balance and representation, understanding how to pronounce people's names.
Before you go into the interview, you treating everyone with the same Salutation. If everyone is a doctor, don't give someone their first name, even if you know them. There's more in this about what to do before the interview and during the interview and even after the interview to be respectful. Same with social media we have. And there's a link here.
Again, our slides are going to be available to you all. There was a blog that we posted, social media Do's and don'ts. This is all kind of common sense. But if you go through this and think about it before you're actually going to post something on Twitter or on a blog, I think this is really very helpful. We developed our medical illustrators, also developed Ed guidance that they follow. And I'm going to wrap up right now for medical illustrations.
They first, as a group, acknowledged that historically medical illustrations have depicted thin, young white people. And now we're changing that. We're trying to understand when it's important and how to do it best. This is just our website. We have an EDC website. First of all, show of hands, how many of you say edc?
How many say D I? Yeah wow. So we used to do Di, but then our team made us change. So we and we listened to them. We listened to them. So that's them. You can get that website. All of our policies are here are linked to the table. Our name change policy, everything from this website.
So you're welcome to it. And I'm going to stop there and turn it over to Patti. OK Thank you. Right Thank you all for these great presentations. What questions do you have? You know, there's lots of questions around language. Uh, do we. Can we?
Think is this. Is this working? Should I go here or there? Oh, I have a question. My name is cammy decker from Cell press. Thank you. This is a great session. I have a question for the perspective.
You said you published these guidelines and asked for feedback. As an editorial, I'm wondering how you manage the communication and I imagine the influx of feedback and also like synthesizing what you learned, basically. Thank you. And we learned something not to do again. So we stood up an email address where we collected all the information and managed them in a shared document because so who sent it, where they were from, what they said, because then we went to get their permission to acknowledge them.
We had we acknowledged about 60 people in the actual guidance for the next one. We will not publish it as an editorial. When we're doing a call, we will publish an editor's note stating that we have the document ready. We please read it and send us feedback the same way. Because now I have we have two guidance. We have the call, the original, which had some inaccuracies in it, things we changed and we have the final and so you can find both.
So my recommendation if you do this is only publish what you think is the final use other tools to share. Very simple question. Why? oh, gosh. Because I listened to the experts.
Equity is sort of the overarching, broader term, and that's why they wanted it to go first. Idea, ideas and accessibility. Yes yes. Yes our organization. American Academy of neurology. Ideas for a while and it was OK. Inclusion my mother just changed it to the.
Great work that you all are doing. But I do have a question. Are you experiencing pushback at all in your. Go first.
Yeah, sure. Are these working? Are they OK? I guess it wasn't working. We OK. I will just say about the c40's guidelines, it was interesting when I worked with our own group. Now it's is it working?
OK when I worked with my own group at the American Academy of neurology that we have our own Di a staff committee. And and people really got down to, you know, finding a lot of differences. So we see a lot of things that are going to have to be changed already. But, you know, it was we definitely did get the message that we need to update these pretty quickly because even with the disk guidelines, they're becoming outdated very, very quickly.
Yeah do you want to? Yes from the APA style perspective, we expect pushback and feedback and we welcome it. Our process for all of our guidelines, but especially the inclusive language guidelines, is to be very inclusive and very iterative. We've got a very vocal and passionate public and we meet on a very regular basis seeing it as we need to continuously learn from and refine these guidelines.
So we welcome all and any feedback and we carefully assess everything and we actually use a tracking system so we can tag everything on social media through the style expert email service, and then we can look at trends and patterns. And of course, there are always discrepancies. We can't please everyone, nor do we intend to. But it does give us a firm, data driven sense for future updates that are needed.
Yeah, so just in general, our manuscript editors are on the front line, so they're the first ones to get pushed back. And it's not just for this, it's just about anything that goes, you know, those of us who are authors pardon me, I'm going to use a term I shouldn't use. We're narcissists, right? We don't want anyone to touch our manuscripts. So that happens.
I will say that occasionally it's loud and it's because there's not a shared understanding of the goals. So I'll tell just a brief story. I got an email from a colleague who said, did you see this on twitter? And it was untagged on the am manual of style Twitter feed. This looks like it's one of the journals. And sure enough, I looked at it.
This was a study about access to reproductive health services in the Uc and the manuscript editor had suggested changing people of color to racial and ethnic minority group and gave 3 or 4 other options. The author was offended and went right to Twitter and said, I just got my proof. And the editor changed to this. And another one said, oh, that's terrible.
Can you tell us the journal? And she wrote, yes. And at risk of being rejected. It is. The name of the journal. That's how it came to me. So I called her and I said, can you? And she was really, how did this happen? And, you know, I said, can I just take 1 minute to explain what we're doing?
And I did. And she said, oh, that's great. I said, so can you tell me in that bucket, people of color, who's in that group? And she told me all these. She left out one very important group and I said, are they not included? Do they not need access to reproductive services? I wasn't that pedantic.
And she said, oh, that's a mistake. I said, this is why we want you to identify everyone. And colloquially, if this was an opinion article, we would have let people of color stand. We just might have, because that's really don't want to keep saying racial and ethnic minority group or something, or everyone every single time. But that's my story. If you can talk with people and share what you're trying to do and learn from them and negotiate, I tell the manuscript editors to use what I call assertive diplomacy, give people choices, help them understand what we're trying to do.
Next question. It's also clear. I have a lot of questions, I guess. I'm also interested to hear more about the training that you did for your editors and sort of what was the response to that like you did talk about the results.
So that was helpful. But yeah, I don't know more about that. Uh, so we have editorial board meetings. We did presentations throughout the year. May I? Sorry we had in person and virtual about 30 of our manuscripts or editors or virtual training just how to do this.
We have regular meetings where people bring things, bring problems to us. The South African colored example is a real example. And that happened in September right after we released our guidance. So we share best practices, we share issues. And then Stacy Christensen, who is the chair of the manual of style committee, Tracy Frye, who is the lead author on the inclusive language chapter.
And I we've been like on like a book tour for like two years. We are giving talks like this, the American Medical writers association, council of Science Editors. And then, patty, did you lead us or did you lead us in the article that we published? Yes and then we published an article in learned publishing about this. But it doesn't end. It's just constantly helping.
It sounds like a lot of this is based on implementing it is manual. Do you have any guidelines on how to do this at scale, whether it's, you know, building it into automated peer automated peer review checks or automated copy editing checks to sort of flag, maybe questionable or challenging language?
This is working. OK? Yeah. Yeah, I think we don't have something like that exactly. But what I do recommend is if you're making the same comments over and over, you're seeing common errors to kind of save your queries and explanations of why to change something that can be useful instead of having to rethink how to word.
If you're continually seeing someone use he or she and you have a response ready, ready to go for that person, just copying and pasting, that can help. I know a, I think we have some like form emails that go out to people. And so looking at the form emails that you're using, making sure you're having inclusive language in, in those.
So making sure that anything that you send out, anything that's like a template is like a good place to start. I think for when implementing inclusive language and making sure that your things that are kind of going out in bulk to lots of people. Um, I don't know if anyone else had. Your patty, I'll just add. Oh, so.
The common reporting issues. We put in boilerplate in all of our revision letters. There are revision letters get kind of long, but the reporting about race and ethnicity, there's a whole section there how to do that and we'll soon be adding to that. Our manuscript editors, we use an XML editor. They have a whole list of saved natural comments and queries that they can pop in for things like in the table.
Please report race and ethnicity and alphabetical order. Things of that nature. So not quite automated, but at least assisted. And I would just add that it's so context dependent. I would advise against global find and replace for such instances. Our IT department at one point wanted us to look at some automated software, but we decided that human cognition was imperative.
But we do have checklists and other tools available to assist with that. The question in the back. And then we'll come back to you. I just had a question. I Sabrina had touched on this with her slide about the updates to the style guide.
How often or how do you notify your writers about those updates? Like, how would they have the most recent information and things that are really pertinent so that they don't have to, you know, look for that for correction. I don't think so. So it is working.
OK so that's a good question. Last so we published it. After publishing it, we revised it or updated it twice or actually three times last year. We're having an update coming up and then we'll probably have another one. So we're on track for two updates this year. In terms of communicating them, we use for internal, we have SLACK and we have kind of broadcast emails that go out to let people know, hey, a new section has been added for external.
I think we use social media and we also have I think some staff members meet with our committee has committees of members. So meeting with people to let them know about updates. And then we have in the guide to scholarly communication when updates are published, they kind of get a badge next to them that says new, and it's kind of highlighted in the table of contents. So people can see where the new information is.
But I think that, yeah, it's an area we can grow in on how to best communicate when updates are because I think, yeah, that is important to let people know that we have some new sections. But yeah, so about three updates last year on track for to this year. No OK. Well, I was just actually going to do a follow up to the question about manual versus automated, because the responses were about the manual burden of responding and addressing the issues.
But the other aspect of that is the ability to surface the issues in the first place that need to be addressed. And that is actually something that, you know, most editorial production workflows use tools like x styles. A lot of the vendors have, you know, pre edit software that they use. The good ones enable the publisher to.
Fine tune those specifically for their use. So that's a first step anyway, of starting to build this intelligence into those tools so that they at least surface the issues for the editor to then address. Yeah and I can say we do use x styles at APA and it's great for flagging some of those issues. But then we want human copy editor to make the final judgment.
No, we do not. That's right. You need to. Exactly yes. Yeah, same thing. So we also use that XML editor x styles and it it does do some things for us automatically, like what to do with the word database. But authors don't like not knowing that you've changed even that word.
So we're very careful about pointing out if we're making a change to a word, we use it for prompting in this area. Well, I think that's all the time we have. I'm supposed to keep people on time, so I want to thank Emily, Sabrina, Annette for their presentations. It was my pleasure to be here.
And Thank you all. Thank you all for coming. Great job. Thank you, Heidi. OK OK. Turn this off.
Segment:0 .
Hi I'll quickly introduce the speakers today. You'll find their full bios online, so I'm simply going to mention how they're involved in developing recent guidelines for language and imaging. I'm Patti Baskin. I'm the executive editor of The five neurology journals published by the American Academy of neurology, and I represented the Council of Science Editors on the four disk steering committee at the time that we developed the guidelines for inclusive language and images from C4 disk.
And so I was the liaison to that workgroup that developed the language guidelines last fall. Emily ayoubi wave is the director of the APA style at the American Psychological Association. She directed the revision of the seventh edition of the Publication Manual of the APA after establishing their first APA style unit in 2015. Sabrina ashwell next is senior copy editor of Chemical and engineering news, the independent news organization of the American Chemical Society.
She chairs the team that created the ACEs inclusivity style guide, and she also contributed to the guidelines on inclusive language and images in scholarly communication from C4 disk. Annette Flanagan is executive managing editor and Vice President of editorial operations for Jama and Jama network and Executive Editor of Jama evidence, and she is an author of the am manual of style and helped develop its recent guidelines on inclusive language for race and ethnicity, and sex and gender.
That's the quick introduction. Um, so in the past few years, several major style guides have been developed, including the C4 disk toolkit guidelines on inclusive language and images in scholarly communication. The am manual of style guidance on inclusive language for reporting race and ethnicity and guidelines on sex and gender. The American Chemical Society inclusivity style guide and the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association.
The representatives I've just introduced from these organizations will discuss the general principles for creating inclusive communication guidelines, methods for development of the style guides, major recommendations and plans for gathering feedback and updating as language and societal norms change. The aims are to point scholarly publishers to these and other resources to embrace and advance equity and inclusion in scholarly publications, and to set industry standards for inclusive writing habits in research and publishing.
I will open by talking first about C for disk and his guidelines. But before I get started, do you all want to come up? There are some seats up here on the about three here in this row, three in the next row. And a couple more further on, give you a chance to get seated. Hey, great.
Still got a few front row seats. People coming in. All right there are a couple of front row seats up here for those just coming. C4 disk believes that organizations and individuals working together can achieve goals more quickly through collaboration and sharing of ideas and resources. So in this session, I'm going to talk about the mission of C4 disc, introduce our toolkits for equity, and give a brief overview of how the guidelines on inclusive language and images came to be, how it is structured and just a few highlights.
C4 disk was founded in 2017 by these 10 trade and professional associations that represent organizations and individuals working in scholarly communications. We now have over 100 additional consortial members and industry partners. And afterward you can ask me about how to become a member of one of those types of members. Um, in our overall goal is to increase diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility in scholarly communications while valuing differences, welcoming diverse perspectives, learning from different communities, making space for marginalized voices, eliminating barriers and serving as allies.
We can do this by providing education and tools that members and partners can use within their own organizations. Individuals and organizations can contribute to the work of fordisc by joining as members or partners and volunteering their time through our working groups. Individuals are invited to join via general call for volunteers and working groups are announced on our website and through our social media accounts.
The projects may involve market research, communications, training on or discussing best practices or working on our tool kits. So we've published four toolkits to this point the anti-racism toolkit for allies, the anti-racism toolkit for organizations, the anti-racism toolkit for black, indigenous and people of color and more. Most recently, the guidelines on inclusive language and images in scholarly communications.
And all these can be found at the fordisc website. There's a tab. Toolkits for equity. And then we have two more that are coming and are currently being developed. Accessibility is planned to be published for early to mid summer and then building and peer review will be is planned for summer or early fall. So the latest toolkit published is the guidelines on inclusive language and images in scholarly communications.
So I'll just touch quickly on what these are. The need for them, the intended audience, the content, how they were created, the various sections, and how we intend for them to be used. So the guidelines document is a global tool. It's an educational resource and a living archive to help all authors, editors and reviewers recognize the use of language and images that are inclusive and culturally sensitive.
The address conscious and unconscious bias in publishing scholarly research. And they aim to set industry standards that promote inclusive writing habits. The guidelines are a living archive to be updated over time that will link to current literature on the topic and other community specific inclusive language guidelines. who are they for?
The guidelines document can be used at various steps of the scholarly publishing process. Authors can use the toolkit when preparing and writing their manuscript for publication. Editors and reviewers can use it when assessing manuscripts at peer review to help flag issues around tone, language and images and suggest more inclusive alternatives. It can also be used by publishers as a resource to ensure their publishing content processes, policies and environment are inclusive and respectful and by scientific associations and societies for language on websites, meetings, marketing and promotional materials and in various ways for writing and communication is involved.
The toolkit includes 12 topical sections, including 10 language sections with two separate sections for images and data visualization. And each of these has a resource list. So most of the sections include a descriptive summary recommendations of terminologies for use or to avoid, and links directing you to relevant literature, resources and other existing guidelines. And the plan is to update each of the sections annually with new recommendations and more references and resources.
So who created this? The guidelines are a true collaborative effort. The working group consisted of 30 colleagues working in the scholarly communication industry, and this included people from associations, from publishers and academic institutions, from various places all around the world. The process after the call for a working group members and selection of the team.
The team chairs develop the team roles for the working group and organize the members in a long Excel table. These roles included project managers, the research team, the writers, editors, designers, proofreaders. Each role was described in detail. And of course, you all know that nothing like this is simple. All this is complicated and time consuming. For example, the writing involved input from researchers and stitching together sections and reviewing multiple drafts and adjusting for uniform tone of style and having external people read and give feedback.
The project managers worked out the timelines for each group to get their work done, and after the writing was finished, everyone used a Google Drive folder for collaboration. We brought in a designer and collaborated with the pub pub staff to post the guidelines online. So here are the 10 language sections that we ended with. All of the sections emphasize that inclusive language, acknowledges diversity, conveys respect to all people, is sensitive to differences, and promotes equal opportunities.
Tips that resonate across all these sections include using first person first language only, including details that are relevant and being specific. Allowing people to self identify whenever possible and considering whether anyone has been left out. Each of these sections contains tables recommending inclusive terminology and terms to avoid and their own specific reference sections. And then there are the two image sections.
Inclusive images and data visualizations show ways to intentionally include a variety of people and to portray people respectfully. They show marginalized people and active, strong roles and not defaulting to showing those who have historically held power in society. They make recommendations for how to represent data by choosing colors, shapes and words to help people connect with the data and to avoid amplifying biases.
The guidelines also include a resources section, which is the most living portion of the toolkit. This comprehensive section includes over 100 links to various resources separated into categories such as tools, images, general language guidelines and topical guidelines. As more guidelines are created by various communities, the list will serve as a living archive. And an index to help users find current and relevant resources.
The working group encourages the scholarly publishing community to suggest new references, recommendations and resources just to help us grow the archive. We have committed to updating the guidelines so that they will stay current and we're currently creating an ongoing work group. To do this. Suggestions that you have can be sent to C4 disk at gmail.com. I'll just mention quickly a couple of examples of one of a language section.
And one of an image section. Both are shorter sections. The shortest sections, I think. And I've chosen those just in the interest of time. So an example of a language section is age discrimination against older adults has received more research than other age categorizations, but is not the only kind of ageism. Ageism includes adultism, which discounts children and teenagers.
The guidelines suggest avoiding assumptions regarding age and stereotypes. The section discusses avoiding age discrimination by suggesting including age, only when it's essential to the context. There is a long list of terms to avoid, to prevent stereotyping, reframing, aging, and asking people to self identify and then terms to use informal research, for example, using specific age ranges and then a section with references.
In the inclusive images section intentionally includes talks about intentionally including a variety of people and seeks to portray people respectfully and disrupt stereotypes. There's a list of varying characteristics to include in images for instance, age, race, gender, disability, hairstyle, skin tone, et cetera. And then there's a list of image banks with images that show diversity and inclusion.
Also included are a number of various aspects to consider. For example, who is in a position of power? What is the environment? And then, of course, there is a list of resources. Um, just a quick note about how we suggest you use the toolkits. These are training materials to help transform workplaces and organizational cultures. They're intended for educational use, not as legal advice.
And they're published under a cc-by-nc share, like 4.0 license. They're free to copy distribute in any medium, reformat build upon to reflect specific contexts or organizations, just as long as there's appropriate credit and links to the license. No commercial use is allowed. I worked with our society to create a derivative language guide for the staff to use in our communications.
It's now going to all of the editors of our journals. It's more concise than the four disk guidelines takes out a couple of the sections. For example, we really don't use immigration or religious terms, and also we added to some sections, for example, the health section where we added neurologic specific terms that are used commonly by our staff. Users can support the guidelines by using them in their organizations and work promoting them at their own events and most importantly, helping us improve the guidelines.
The guidelines will continue to expand and evolve along with ever changing language, and we invite you to join us in improving them and also to join us in our other future initiatives at fordisc. So thank you very much. And I am going to turn the podium over to Emily. Thank you, patty. And I should reiterate that we have seats in the front, so please come and rest your feet if you're so inclined.
I'm Emily ayubi and I will be discussing inclusive language and imagery from the perspective of the American Psychological Association and APA style. So to begin, here is a history of inclusive language efforts at APA. Apa has been publishing guidelines for written scholarly communication since 1929, but it wasn't until the late 1970s that formal efforts began to instruct researchers to avoid bias in language.
This began with guidance to avoid sexist language such as he to refer to a generic person. In 1983, APA added more guidelines about avoiding racial and ethnic bias, which was brief and primarily focused on not generalizing and stereotyping groups of people. Today's bias free language guidelines originated in 1994 with the fourth edition Publication Manual and were revised with the fifth and sixth editions in 2001 and 2009.
The current version of the bias free language guidelines was published in 2019 with the seventh edition Publication Manual also in 2019. Apa established the equity, diversity, and inclusion office or Ed office, as part of its commitment to systematically and institutionally examine, acknowledge and dismantle racism and other forms of destructive social hierarchies such as sexism, ableism, ageism, heterosexism, classism and religious bigotry.
In 2021, APA published the inclusive language guidelines to augment the bias free language guidelines. The inclusive language guide addresses additional terms as well as in-person communication and is designed to be more frequently updated. And these guidelines also help to fulfill the APA strategic objective to share Ed knowledge with industries in disciplines outside psychology. We expect the next update to be published later this year.
So next, I'll describe how inclusive language guidelines are developed at APA. The guidelines STEM from research with real people who tell us what language they want others to use when referring to them. People share their lived experiences with psychologists and representatives of advocacy organizations through research and feedback. Researchers then publish the findings as psychological science in journal articles and books.
Committees of experts then distill that research and feedback from the public and create summary guidance for each topic. Then the APA style team and the Ed office use their subject matter, expertise and writing skills to refine the guidance from the committees and also consult with additional subject matter experts, resulting in the bias free and inclusive language guidelines which are published by APA.
In between formal revisions, the teams meet to discuss interim feedback and plan for new updates. The guidelines are also freely available to everyone with links included in subsequent slides. Our guidance on inclusive language is meant to be a living and evolving document that responds to changes in society. Your and others responses to the guidelines further inform their development for the future, so please feel free to reach out with your feedback and know that it will be evaluated by our teams of experts.
So the bias free and inclusive language guidelines were developed with the help of many committees and advocacy groups that are listed here. We have infused this into our daily work and collaborate with hundreds of experts who both represent and work directly with these populations. We also consult published guidance from other organizations and advocacy groups, but these are the organizations, divisions and societies that we work directly with to provide input as well as review our draft guidelines.
To read the bias free language guidelines, check out the Publication Manual or the concise guide to APA style or scan the QR code on the screen to read the guidelines in full on the APA style website. There you'll find specific guidance and examples about seven different topic areas age, disability, gender, race and ethnicity, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status and intersectionality.
The section on intersectionality is rooted in Dr. Kimberly Crenshaw's seminal work. In addition to serve our global community of APA style users, we have worked with international publishing partners to translate the publication manual, including our bias free language guidelines into seven languages thus far, including Spanish, Portuguese, Greek, turkish, traditional Chinese, simplified Chinese and Japanese with more languages to follow.
The inclusive language guidelines are also published on apa's website and serve as a supplement to the bias free language guidelines. You can read them in full on the APA website linked to here. In contrast to the bias free language guidelines, the inclusive language guide is only published online and thus is designed to be more frequently updated to include more terms as language evolves and people have questions and to address in person as well as written communication.
The inclusive language guidelines are structured as a glossary to help people easily identify terms and learn how to use them. The topics covered in the inclusive language guide include general terms related to equity and power, such as cultural humility, allyship and privilege, person first and identity first language identity terms for the seven topics covered in the publication manual, avoiding microaggressions and conversation and language that doesn't say what we mean.
The next edition of the inclusive language guide will also include advice regarding neurodiversity, pregnancy, body size and religious discrimination. So this is our framework for structuring our guidance on inclusive language, psychological science and work with real people creates the foundation for our general principles for using inclusive language on which reside. The specific recommendations regarding language used for various topics.
Although the specific recommendations change over time in response to societal changes, and although people may disagree on specifics, the overarching goal is to be as inclusive as possible with your language choices. Because inclusive language affirms and values the human dignity of others, even as terminology changes. Our guiding principles of inclusion and respect prevail. So as previously noted, APA has provided guidance on inclusive language to people writing in the field of psychology for more than 40 years.
More recently, apa's efforts have expanded so that we're reaching more people around the globe, including millions of students, educators, researchers, editors and publishing professionals in disciplines beyond psychology, including nursing, education, business and more. Our guidance is backed by science on how to write and speak about others with dignity and respect. As a result, when we use language that includes people, we are better able to affirm, celebrate and appreciate different people in all aspects of our lives.
So the first general principle for avoiding bias and being inclusive is to describe people at the appropriate level of specificity. That means to focus on relevant characteristics, characteristics. The most general. And inclusive terms can refer to anyone. Words like person, individual or human. Relevant characteristics of specificity will be guided by the nature of your research and/or the research you are publishing.
As an example, one way to be more specific is by describing age. In addition to age, it may be relevant to also report, for example, gender. The second principle for avoiding bias is to be sensitive to labels by calling people what they call themselves or what they want others to call them in cases of discrepancy. The best way to know what somebody wants to be called is to ask them.
However, that's not always possible. So if you're writing about groups of people, you can consult the APA style guidelines and other resources that are linked at the end of this presentation, or check with advocacy groups. If you have questions about what terms to use. The two kinds of language used with labels are person first and identity first language. For example, person first language gives us constructions such as person with substance use disorder instead of, for example, substance abuser.
In contrast, identity first language uses an adjective before the noun, for example, blind person or autistic person. Apa's policy is that both person first and identity first language are approaches that are intended to respect disabled people. Therefore, it's acceptable to use either approach unless or until that a group prefers 1 over the other, in which case always use the preferred approach.
In addition, the level of disability identity integration is often predictive of whether a community will use identity first language. That is, when people understand a disability as being inseparable from who they are. They are more likely to use identity first language. For example, many deaf people capitalize the D in deaf and use the word deaf in an identity first way rather than saying people who are deaf with a lowercase D or people with hearing loss.
However, person first language may be more suitable for people with other disabilities, such as person with Down syndrome. In addition, the word disabled should not be perceived as negative or pejorative. Therefore, use the term disabled person or person with a disability, but in general, avoid nouns and language that perpetuates stigma or stereotypes.
Likewise, avoid euphemistic language such as special needs or differently abled, and also avoid fatalistic language such as wheelchair bound confined to a wheelchair or stroke victim. Instead, it's wheelchair user or person who had a stroke. Conversely, don't make the leap from portraying people with disabilities as incapable or as victims by using patronizing language such as you're such an inspiration, remember that people with disabilities or disabled people are real people who have real preferences for how you refer to them.
So pronouns are also vitally important to discuss gender with inclusivity. When discussing specific people, use their identified pronouns when discussing hypothetical or generic people or people of unknown gender. Use the gender neutral pronoun singular. They APA unequivocally supports the use of singular they in writing. We do not recommend recasting sentences to avoid its usage.
The singular they has been used for hundreds of years in literature and is widely used in everyday speech. Furthermore, supporting the use of singular they in scholarly writing helps move thinking away from a gender binary and toward more inclusivity. So I briefly COVID guidelines for age, gender and disability. When speaking about the general principles. But here's a snapshot of additional specific guidelines by topic.
But please note that this is not at all comprehensive. We have the guidelines in full on our website. So another critical component of our Ed framework is accessibility. Apa is committed to ensuring accessibility for all users. In addition to ensuring that our APA style resources are accessible, we also work with accessibility experts to ensure that APA style itself and the editorial guidelines therein are compliant with web content and accessibility guidelines or wcag level AA standards.
And then when it comes to best practices for inclusive imagery, a key starting point is to have a solid sense of your organizational values, your intended audience, and your content to ensure that the images you use reflect those values in content. And equally, it's as important to avoid bias and images in the same way that you would avoid bias in language.
Do not choose images that perpetuate stereotypes about different groups of people. Keep in mind that stereotypes can be negative or positive. So be sure that you're showing people in typical life situations as long as that's relevant to your organizational values and content. This reinforces that there are many ways to be human. So to avoid making the audience think of a specific person, you may want to choose images without people or in which people are not the focus.
And then to conclude, I wanted to reinforce that we have made these guidelines available for all and encourage you to consult and use them with appropriate attribution and with links back to these original sources. So please stay in touch with the APA style team. Check out our guidelines on our website, visit our blog and social media, including our newly launched YouTube channel, and send us your thoughts and questions on inclusive language or other aspects of APA style to style.
Expert at APA org. Thank you. And now I will pass it on to Sabrina. Hello, my name is Sabrina ashwell and I'm going to talk about the ACEs inclusivity style guide, which is a guide on inclusive language and images from the American Chemical Society. My role is senior copy editor of Chemical and engineering news or CNN, the independent news organization of ACEs.
I also chaired the team that created the ACEs inclusivity style guide, and I continue to play a key role on that team. And as Patti mentioned, I contributed to the C4 disk guidelines as well. So I have a perspective from both a contributor and a leader of these types of guides. First, I wanted to give some background on ACEs and how the guide came about. ACEs is a nonprofit, member based professional society with over 173,000 individuals in our global membership, community diversity, equity, inclusion and respect, or I is a core value of ACEs.
In one of our strategic goals is to embrace and advance inclusion in chemistry. To help meet this goal in 2021, the Office of diversity, equity, inclusion and respect in the communications division created a joint objective to create a guide on inclusive language and images for society, staff and members. We saw inclusive language and images as a key opportunity to help foster a welcoming and supportive environment.
The goal of the inclusivity style guide was to create an easy to use tool that staff and members could use to help make decisions around language and images. The team included people from several departments at ACEs. And having this wide range of people helped us get a view of access needs around inclusive language and helped ensure we had the right mix of expertise to create a guide on inclusive communication.
Used internal resources as a jumping off point. Chemical and engineering news had expanded its section on bias free language in its style guide in early 2021. Cnn's der committee had also created checklists to help reporters, editors, social media users and people choosing art ensure that stories were inclusive and reflected the diversity of the Chemical sciences. Those tools gave us a starting point to expand from. But before starting to expand those resources, we wanted to identify access needs related to inclusive communication.
So we asked several staff members outside our team for input, and we did a brief audit of ACEs materials to identify areas where the language and images could be more inclusive. Once we identified access needs, we had to decide how our guide could meet those needs. We created principles to guide our work. Broadly, we knew the main principles were to support access, core value of diversity, equity, inclusion and respect, and help us meet its strategic goal to create a welcoming and supportive environment.
More specifically, we wanted to create a guide that was authoritative, clear, flexible meaning, widely applicable, easy to find and use and easy to update. I'm going to give an overview of the process and then explain how we implemented our guiding principles throughout the process. So the basic process is pretty simple. We prioritized what to include in the first iteration of the guide.
Did research synthesized that research, decided on the guidelines and then wrote them? The important piece here is the iterative next step, which was getting feedback, revising, and then getting more feedback and revising. To give our guide authority relied on extensive research. We read existing guides, including those by journalistic groups and advocacy organizations.
We also had to look beyond formal guides and read articles by the people we wanted to describe and by experts on inclusive language and images. Examples of some of the groups that influenced ACEs guidelines are on this slide, but this is just a subset. The important piece is to seek guidelines from the people who the language will affect. To make our recommendations as clear as possible.
We decided to provide a background section, recommendation and examples, preferably from published work, so people can see the guidelines put into practice. Here's an example of an entry. This format allows people who want just the guideline to read the recommendation and those who want to understand the why can read the background. An example shows the guideline in practice and following this consistent format throughout the guide makes our guide easy to use and shows a clear guideline.
One of the things that sets our guide apart is that when possible, we include examples from published works to show how real people can put these guidelines into practice. For instance, in our guidelines to recognize intersectionality in body size. We included a quote from a report, and I think these examples help make the guidelines a little less intimidating because they show that people are already putting these guidelines into practice that it is possible to do what we're saying.
We also wrote our guidelines so they could be applied to a wide variety of material. And many recommendations include discussion of the nuance around when to use certain language instead of creating a list of words to use and not use, which can oversimplify a complex, context dependent decision. We wanted to give people the tools to make informed decisions about communication.
We wanted to convey that there are no universally correct words to memorize. There is only what is more inclusive for a given situation. So in some examples, we would say the most appropriate language will depend on or if your audience is made up of these people, then use these words. And we also give several options depending on different circumstances.
One of our guiding principles was to make the guide easy to access. That led us to put the guide on acs's website at x.org inclusivity guide and make it freely available. And our team really thought through how to make the guide approachable as well. So instead of starting off with right into the paragraphs of recommendations, we have a home page that shows the sections and entry titles to kind of welcome people in to the guide.
To expand our reach. We also included the guide as an open access chapter in ACEs style guide, the ACEs guide to scholarly communication, which is a resource used by students, researchers, educators and librarians. Publishing it in both places helped expand our audience and including it in a wider style guide helped show that this should be inclusive.
Communication should be an aspect of effective communication. It applies to all communicators, and it's not something that should be separate or siloed for just certain people or certain communications. Make the guide easy to use. We worked with the web team to make the guide intuitive and easy to navigate.
We created resources such as tip sheets and practice examples to help people use the guide in their daily work. We also have a change history section so people can see the changes over time. Our aim is for this to help people quickly find what has changed since the last time they read the guide. To make the guide easy to update, we ensured that staff had access to edit the xorg version and we worked with the publications team to be able to send edits throughout the year outside the regular cycle of edits to that guide.
Importantly, we created an update plan before releasing the guide so that we had a structure in place for when to make regular updates and how to make updates that were more urgent and communicating. These plans to the people in charge of the websites really helped us make sure they were prepared for any updates that would come.
Now we'll talk about the guidelines themselves. The guide starts with general guidelines that apply to all topic areas. Then we have recommendations for specific topics and formats. Guidelines for images and a brief overview of major accessibility concerns. Then we have our free resources like the tip sheets that I mentioned earlier. Here are the current topics covered, which can give you a sense of the breadth of the guide.
Our sections on body size forms, job descriptions and images are particularly important because not many inclusive language guides cover those topics. We're continuing to research inclusive communication and update the guide. For example, we're planning to add sections on data visualization and sentence structure and framing. We're committed to continually learning and ensuring the guide remains relevant to users.
These are the general guidelines from the ACEs inclusivity style guide. These apply to all types of content and formats. They are involve a diverse group of people. Be appropriately specific. Avoid labeling people by characteristic. Ask people how they want to be described and respect that decision.
Description include personal information, thoughtfully recognize words that assume a cultural norm. And recognize when to use diverse. The guideline I wanted to highlight today was the one to involve a diverse group of people. We start with this guideline because it gives you a strong foundation to create inclusive communication. Having diverse teams means you get a range of perspectives. You can begin to see how people interpret language differently depending on their experiences.
When we're more insulated and have more homogeneous teams, it's harder to realize the different impacts that language can have. A few notes of caution here. First, when you do approach others for feedback, try not to put people on the spot. Second, because groups have extreme variety. No one person can speak for an entire race, gender or other characteristic.
Third, make a practice of seeking feedback beyond questions of identity. Treat people as full valued members of the team. Also recognize people's contribution, if not by compensation, than by formal or informal recognition at your organization. These are the other general guidelines, and you'll notice some overlap with the guidelines mentioned from fordisc and APA.
In the interest of time, I'll skip describing these, but you can find the full guidelines available on our website at x.org inclusivity guide. I wanted to just reiterate that we're committed to continually learning and recognizes that language and people's preferences change over time. So we will update the guide to make sure that it remains relevant. We also recognize that we're not perfect and everyone, including me, is still learning about how to be as inclusive as possible.
If we make a mistake, we apologize, learn, and try to do better next time, Thank you for your attention. I'm happy to answer any questions at the end and feel free to email me or ISG at assist.org with any further questions.
Hi, everyone. I'm Annette Flanagan, and I just want to recognize the incredible work and leadership of these colleagues. We're all on this journey together, and the work you all are doing is. I'm just so impressed by it. So thank you. Thank you.
My disclosures. The am manual of style is published by Oxford University press. Thank you oup. Am gets a Royalty for that. I do not benefit from that personally financially, but my salary is paid by the AMA, so. Good these are the members of our team.
They represent a wide variety of backgrounds and professional roles manuscript editors, managing editors and physician editors who handle manuscripts. The Jama network has published the am manual of style for 70 years or so. We're in the 11th edition. This is just to show you that starting in 1998, the ninth edition of the am manual of style actually had guidance on respect for persons, particularly with regard to race and ethnicity.
That was our first entry into that area. The 10th edition expanded the inclusive language section. There's an entire chapter on exclusive language and the 11th edition, which was published in February of 2020. And that date's important had a major revision to the section on reporting race and ethnicity. But as you all recall, there was a lot going on in this country at that time, a lot of violence, murder, and that brought our attention to some things that really needed to be changed.
So we actually did our first update two months after this edition was released. This is our process for we had we pulled the committee together. And it took eight months to identify the areas that needed attention and to prioritize them. We revised the guidance and published it as an editorial in February 2020 in Jama. We've never done that before, but Jama has a sort of a big reach, and we thought that would be the best way to get a call for feedback.
And we got a lot. We actually got in writing named criticism assessments, ideas from 60 different individuals and groups with expertise in Ed and reporting race and ethnicity in general. We did additional research, additional revision, and the new guidance was published in August of 2021. At that time, we shared all of the guidance with all of our editors, all of our editorial boards, and we began a three month intense training process for our manuscript editors.
Then we did a post-implementation study of the guidance to see if it had had any effect. These are the key principles. Race and ethnicity are social constructs. I think all know that. We address important sensitivities and controversies related to these terms in medical research and publication, we acknowledge that language and terminology must be accurate, clear, precise and must reflect fairness, equity and consistency.
When reporting on race and ethnicity, I'm mostly going to be focusing on research reporting, but I'm happy to talk about how to deal with this in news or opinion pieces. Reporting in race and ethnicity should not be considered in isolation. As you've heard from the colleagues, intersectionality with social determinants of Health and other factors are very important.
For research articles, who or what classified participant race and ethnicity and the source of the classifications with preprints for self description is emphasized throughout. And the guidance is not final. We've done several updates since the August 2020 and 2021 release and we'll continue to do more. These are the guidance components. We have definitions of commonly used terms.
That was an area we got a lot of assessment. If you actually want to look at maybe some archaic terms, anybody here from merriam-webster? Good so they have some archaic terms. If you want to see an example, we have a good section on concerns and controversies, particularly with algorithms that are used that are probably inappropriately used based on race.
How to use racial and ethnic collective or umbrella terms. And I'll give you some examples. Best practice for capitalizations, for abbreviations, strong guidance for listing racial and ethnic categories in alphabetical order and not order of proportion. So many are by proportion. If you look around this room, you can look at the proportion. You guys can all self-identify, but we can guess that's not the way to do it.
So you want to start with the Asian or African-American or Black and so on. We have guidance on adjectival use and avoiding race and ethnicity as nouns. A lot of discussion on geographic origin and regionalization, and we have examples throughout. So this is an example of a table. Can I have that? Sabrina of a table that we have published.
By the way, this guidance is all freely available. Um, on the Jama website and on the am manual of style. I don't know if you can see this, but it's Jama network.com/pages/inclusive language. So we put together a table of terms to avoid in terms to prefer with some explanation. I very much like what ACEs has done about the rationale for all of that, and we've tried to put that in this table, why we capitalize the terms, be in Black and white.
And we thought long and hard about that. I think AP does not capitalize the W and white, but the rest of us do over here with obvious exceptions. When you're talking about white supremacy or things of that nature, that we list these categories in alpha order, as I've mentioned, and not to use these as nouns. With a lot of debate about the word minority. So we had conflicting guidance from experts on whether the term is accurate, stigmatizing depending on how people identify.
And this applies now not only to race and ethnicity, but to sex, gender, sexual orientation, abilities, disabilities and so on. So we avoid using it. We recommend other collective terms, if possible. Underserved populations. When referring to health disparities among groups or underrepresented populations, the term minoritized or marginalized can be used.
We advise not using the word mixed race now in some databases in some countries, that's a formal term. So if it's used in the database, we just ask it to be defined and we recommend using things like multiracial or multiethnic. This is an area where we probably have a little disagreement.
But just remember, I'm talking about research. So we got guidance that the terms people of color and bipoc are probably not as inclusive as they are intended to be. And if you think about bipoc, there's a natural hierarchy actually in the abbreviation, so we avoid using it. If it was part of a study, if it's a database meta field, we still ask people to explain what those, what those terms are.
And in the guidance, there's reference to people who identify as people who might be included in this group to say why they don't like these terms. And you can read more about that if you'd like. We ran into a lot of other national, very local terms that are used nationally that are not understood internationally. So South African colloids in South Africa and the Canadian visible minority in Canada are terms that are used by government and census and employment issues.
There's a reason for it. When we see these in manuscripts and we do, we ask the authors to identify who is in that group. And you can see here in one example admixed African individuals or Canadian census categories of Arab Black Chinese. And you can read the list here. And then we don't use the term. As best we can.
And so far, authors have been really, really good about that. When we ran into the South African colloids example, we actually talked with the managing editor of the South African medical journal and said, we're not comfortable with this term. And she said, oh, we don't use it either. So the government does. But the word other. So this is a thing we need to really improve on.
So for now, if the word other is used, we require and it's usually in a table, it's everybody and then this other and it's usually because the numbers are relatively small and they're trying to show some particular difference. We ask them to define everyone that's included in other I would like another word than other. And if anyone has one, please let me know because I don't think the word other for obvious reasons is a good term either.
We suggest avoiding collective reference to racial and ethnic groups as non-white. You don't know who that is. We want it expanded. We have similar concerns about dichotomized comparisons between only two racial or two ethnic groups. What we particularly see are Black versus white. You could say, among Black and white people who identify.
But versus is not a good way to explain that at all. We then I just hit something. I'm good. I'm good. Thank you. OK, so I will just say, if you Google Jama Network Open may 12th and my name, you will see a formal apology that we published because authors didn't get this right in a research letter which has limited number of words.
It was a study of an antidiabetic drug for people with chronic kidney disease, and it was comparing these two groups and it was based on a clinical trial. And in the methods it says, and we did this because it was based as a secondary analysis on our protocol. So when I went to look at the tweet, I saw that and I thought, I guess this is going to be OK, but I missed that they had verses in the Title I of the reviewers had recommended because of the word limit that the authors would reduce the length of their introduction.
They took out sentence one, which was the framing, which explained why they were doing this comparison. So Twitter went crazy, as you would imagine. So there's the apology, and that's my recommendation. We're not perfect. We're all learning. When we don't get it right, we should just tell everyone. And that's what we've done.
And we corrected the article with the authors fully on board. I mentioned that we did an assessment of whether or not we thought there would be an impact. So we looked at three, three month periods, one a year before the guidance, one right before the guidance was released, and then about six months after the guidance to allow time. And we looked at what was being reported, where in the article race and ethnicity were being reported, the number and order of categories, if other was used, was it defined, and was race and ethnicity itself defined in the methods section?
We had 249 articles in 3 journals. Higher percentages reported study participants, age and sex and gender, which is not surprising. Roughly 87 to 100% reporting of race and ethnicity improves slightly from 57% to 67% But this was not statistically significant. So we have work to do, and there was almost no change in the reporting of socioeconomic status, which is very much where we have some work to do.
These were the three areas where we found differences. The categories were being defined in other they were being presented in alpha order, probably Thanks to our manuscript editor who were asking the authors to do that during editing. And there was indication of how race and ethnicity was determined. The main takeaway point here is in the last bullet here that socioeconomic status variables are still way underreported.
And when we get into intersectionality, this is going to be very important. How am I doing on time? Too good. Great so these are the other major areas in the inclusive language section. We are now just completing the draft of the revision on sex, gender identity, sex and sexual orientation.
We thought long and hard. We looked at APA and we've combined sexual orientation used to be separate. We're we're having trouble. So it's together. It's under review. And I'll give you just a couple of things about it. This is our current guidance. It's probably pretty obvious to you all.
The last bullet is something we've dipped our toe into how we're dealing with pregnancy. So we are using terms, pregnant participants, pregnant individuals, pregnant patients. Most of the authors are OK with this. Some of them hate this. And we are very respectful of cultural issues. So in a paper from Iran, this may not work. They may have to actually use a feminine term to explain this, and we're OK with that if that's what the authors need.
These are the components of our guidance. You can read the slide here to see what we're going to be looking at. And we are looking for volunteers. If you consider yourself an expert in edi, particularly in the areas of gender, gender, identity, sex and sexual orientation, just shoot me an email. My email is at the end of this slide and we'd welcome you just quickly.
I'm not going to spend time on these, but I want you to know that we have developed guidance ground up. Leading from the middle, I think was a book that we heard about yesterday. So our multimedia and social media teams developed very specific guidance for using inclusive language in audio and video interviews. And you can see this is actually based on our guidance in general what to do if you're a host, how who you're going to pick to be the host, who you're going to pick to be the interviewee or interviewees, making sure there's balance and representation, understanding how to pronounce people's names.
Before you go into the interview, you treating everyone with the same Salutation. If everyone is a doctor, don't give someone their first name, even if you know them. There's more in this about what to do before the interview and during the interview and even after the interview to be respectful. Same with social media we have. And there's a link here.
Again, our slides are going to be available to you all. There was a blog that we posted, social media Do's and don'ts. This is all kind of common sense. But if you go through this and think about it before you're actually going to post something on Twitter or on a blog, I think this is really very helpful. We developed our medical illustrators, also developed Ed guidance that they follow. And I'm going to wrap up right now for medical illustrations.
They first, as a group, acknowledged that historically medical illustrations have depicted thin, young white people. And now we're changing that. We're trying to understand when it's important and how to do it best. This is just our website. We have an EDC website. First of all, show of hands, how many of you say edc?
How many say D I? Yeah wow. So we used to do Di, but then our team made us change. So we and we listened to them. We listened to them. So that's them. You can get that website. All of our policies are here are linked to the table. Our name change policy, everything from this website.
So you're welcome to it. And I'm going to stop there and turn it over to Patti. OK Thank you. Right Thank you all for these great presentations. What questions do you have? You know, there's lots of questions around language. Uh, do we. Can we?
Think is this. Is this working? Should I go here or there? Oh, I have a question. My name is cammy decker from Cell press. Thank you. This is a great session. I have a question for the perspective.
You said you published these guidelines and asked for feedback. As an editorial, I'm wondering how you manage the communication and I imagine the influx of feedback and also like synthesizing what you learned, basically. Thank you. And we learned something not to do again. So we stood up an email address where we collected all the information and managed them in a shared document because so who sent it, where they were from, what they said, because then we went to get their permission to acknowledge them.
We had we acknowledged about 60 people in the actual guidance for the next one. We will not publish it as an editorial. When we're doing a call, we will publish an editor's note stating that we have the document ready. We please read it and send us feedback the same way. Because now I have we have two guidance. We have the call, the original, which had some inaccuracies in it, things we changed and we have the final and so you can find both.
So my recommendation if you do this is only publish what you think is the final use other tools to share. Very simple question. Why? oh, gosh. Because I listened to the experts.
Equity is sort of the overarching, broader term, and that's why they wanted it to go first. Idea, ideas and accessibility. Yes yes. Yes our organization. American Academy of neurology. Ideas for a while and it was OK. Inclusion my mother just changed it to the.
Great work that you all are doing. But I do have a question. Are you experiencing pushback at all in your. Go first.
Yeah, sure. Are these working? Are they OK? I guess it wasn't working. We OK. I will just say about the c40's guidelines, it was interesting when I worked with our own group. Now it's is it working?
OK when I worked with my own group at the American Academy of neurology that we have our own Di a staff committee. And and people really got down to, you know, finding a lot of differences. So we see a lot of things that are going to have to be changed already. But, you know, it was we definitely did get the message that we need to update these pretty quickly because even with the disk guidelines, they're becoming outdated very, very quickly.
Yeah do you want to? Yes from the APA style perspective, we expect pushback and feedback and we welcome it. Our process for all of our guidelines, but especially the inclusive language guidelines, is to be very inclusive and very iterative. We've got a very vocal and passionate public and we meet on a very regular basis seeing it as we need to continuously learn from and refine these guidelines.
So we welcome all and any feedback and we carefully assess everything and we actually use a tracking system so we can tag everything on social media through the style expert email service, and then we can look at trends and patterns. And of course, there are always discrepancies. We can't please everyone, nor do we intend to. But it does give us a firm, data driven sense for future updates that are needed.
Yeah, so just in general, our manuscript editors are on the front line, so they're the first ones to get pushed back. And it's not just for this, it's just about anything that goes, you know, those of us who are authors pardon me, I'm going to use a term I shouldn't use. We're narcissists, right? We don't want anyone to touch our manuscripts. So that happens.
I will say that occasionally it's loud and it's because there's not a shared understanding of the goals. So I'll tell just a brief story. I got an email from a colleague who said, did you see this on twitter? And it was untagged on the am manual of style Twitter feed. This looks like it's one of the journals. And sure enough, I looked at it.
This was a study about access to reproductive health services in the Uc and the manuscript editor had suggested changing people of color to racial and ethnic minority group and gave 3 or 4 other options. The author was offended and went right to Twitter and said, I just got my proof. And the editor changed to this. And another one said, oh, that's terrible.
Can you tell us the journal? And she wrote, yes. And at risk of being rejected. It is. The name of the journal. That's how it came to me. So I called her and I said, can you? And she was really, how did this happen? And, you know, I said, can I just take 1 minute to explain what we're doing?
And I did. And she said, oh, that's great. I said, so can you tell me in that bucket, people of color, who's in that group? And she told me all these. She left out one very important group and I said, are they not included? Do they not need access to reproductive services? I wasn't that pedantic.
And she said, oh, that's a mistake. I said, this is why we want you to identify everyone. And colloquially, if this was an opinion article, we would have let people of color stand. We just might have, because that's really don't want to keep saying racial and ethnic minority group or something, or everyone every single time. But that's my story. If you can talk with people and share what you're trying to do and learn from them and negotiate, I tell the manuscript editors to use what I call assertive diplomacy, give people choices, help them understand what we're trying to do.
Next question. It's also clear. I have a lot of questions, I guess. I'm also interested to hear more about the training that you did for your editors and sort of what was the response to that like you did talk about the results.
So that was helpful. But yeah, I don't know more about that. Uh, so we have editorial board meetings. We did presentations throughout the year. May I? Sorry we had in person and virtual about 30 of our manuscripts or editors or virtual training just how to do this.
We have regular meetings where people bring things, bring problems to us. The South African colored example is a real example. And that happened in September right after we released our guidance. So we share best practices, we share issues. And then Stacy Christensen, who is the chair of the manual of style committee, Tracy Frye, who is the lead author on the inclusive language chapter.
And I we've been like on like a book tour for like two years. We are giving talks like this, the American Medical writers association, council of Science Editors. And then, patty, did you lead us or did you lead us in the article that we published? Yes and then we published an article in learned publishing about this. But it doesn't end. It's just constantly helping.
It sounds like a lot of this is based on implementing it is manual. Do you have any guidelines on how to do this at scale, whether it's, you know, building it into automated peer automated peer review checks or automated copy editing checks to sort of flag, maybe questionable or challenging language?
This is working. OK? Yeah. Yeah, I think we don't have something like that exactly. But what I do recommend is if you're making the same comments over and over, you're seeing common errors to kind of save your queries and explanations of why to change something that can be useful instead of having to rethink how to word.
If you're continually seeing someone use he or she and you have a response ready, ready to go for that person, just copying and pasting, that can help. I know a, I think we have some like form emails that go out to people. And so looking at the form emails that you're using, making sure you're having inclusive language in, in those.
So making sure that anything that you send out, anything that's like a template is like a good place to start. I think for when implementing inclusive language and making sure that your things that are kind of going out in bulk to lots of people. Um, I don't know if anyone else had. Your patty, I'll just add. Oh, so.
The common reporting issues. We put in boilerplate in all of our revision letters. There are revision letters get kind of long, but the reporting about race and ethnicity, there's a whole section there how to do that and we'll soon be adding to that. Our manuscript editors, we use an XML editor. They have a whole list of saved natural comments and queries that they can pop in for things like in the table.
Please report race and ethnicity and alphabetical order. Things of that nature. So not quite automated, but at least assisted. And I would just add that it's so context dependent. I would advise against global find and replace for such instances. Our IT department at one point wanted us to look at some automated software, but we decided that human cognition was imperative.
But we do have checklists and other tools available to assist with that. The question in the back. And then we'll come back to you. I just had a question. I Sabrina had touched on this with her slide about the updates to the style guide.
How often or how do you notify your writers about those updates? Like, how would they have the most recent information and things that are really pertinent so that they don't have to, you know, look for that for correction. I don't think so. So it is working.
OK so that's a good question. Last so we published it. After publishing it, we revised it or updated it twice or actually three times last year. We're having an update coming up and then we'll probably have another one. So we're on track for two updates this year. In terms of communicating them, we use for internal, we have SLACK and we have kind of broadcast emails that go out to let people know, hey, a new section has been added for external.
I think we use social media and we also have I think some staff members meet with our committee has committees of members. So meeting with people to let them know about updates. And then we have in the guide to scholarly communication when updates are published, they kind of get a badge next to them that says new, and it's kind of highlighted in the table of contents. So people can see where the new information is.
But I think that, yeah, it's an area we can grow in on how to best communicate when updates are because I think, yeah, that is important to let people know that we have some new sections. But yeah, so about three updates last year on track for to this year. No OK. Well, I was just actually going to do a follow up to the question about manual versus automated, because the responses were about the manual burden of responding and addressing the issues.
But the other aspect of that is the ability to surface the issues in the first place that need to be addressed. And that is actually something that, you know, most editorial production workflows use tools like x styles. A lot of the vendors have, you know, pre edit software that they use. The good ones enable the publisher to.
Fine tune those specifically for their use. So that's a first step anyway, of starting to build this intelligence into those tools so that they at least surface the issues for the editor to then address. Yeah and I can say we do use x styles at APA and it's great for flagging some of those issues. But then we want human copy editor to make the final judgment.
No, we do not. That's right. You need to. Exactly yes. Yeah, same thing. So we also use that XML editor x styles and it it does do some things for us automatically, like what to do with the word database. But authors don't like not knowing that you've changed even that word.
So we're very careful about pointing out if we're making a change to a word, we use it for prompting in this area. Well, I think that's all the time we have. I'm supposed to keep people on time, so I want to thank Emily, Sabrina, Annette for their presentations. It was my pleasure to be here.
And Thank you all. Thank you all for coming. Great job. Thank you, Heidi. OK OK. Turn this off.
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