Date: Thursday, October 15, 2025
Speaker: Alex Csiszar
Title: Citation Analysis and Academic Discrimination in the 1970s: Entangled Histories
Abstract: This talk will trace the entangled history of new attempts to identify and challenge sexual discrimination in academia and the rise of technologies and algorithms for measuring scientific productivity during the 1970s. New legislation passed in the United States in 1972 opened the door to a string of lawsuits against universities claiming discrimination in hiring and tenure decisions. This happened just as scholars and entrepreneurs were beginning to develop tools to use citation data to evaluate and compare not only scientific fields but individual scientists. Early optimism that these new tools might provide objective proof of discrimination were tempered by an increasing realization that citations weren't quite the neutral and unobtrusive markers that some hoped they might be. What emerged from these entanglements by the early 1980s was not only a great deal of research in the field of scientometrics, but the beginnings of a theory of the politics of citation and calls for citational justice.
Bio: Alex Csiszar researches the history of information technologies in the sciences. He is the author of The Scientific Journal: Authorship and the Politics of Knowledge in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago, 2018) and is currently completing a book titled Rank and File: From the Literature Search to Algorithmic Judgment. He is a professor at the Department of the History of Science, Harvard University.
