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Reporting Race and Ethnicity in Genetics Research: Do Journal Recommendations or Resources Matter?

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Abstract

Appeals to scrutinize the use of race and ethnicity as variables in genetics research notwithstanding, these variables continue to be inadequately explained and inconsistently used in research publications. In previous research, we found that published genetic research fails to follow suggestions offered for addressing this problem, such as explaining the basis on which these labels are assigned to populations. This study, an analysis of genetic research articles using race or ethnicity terms, explores possible features of journals that are associated with improved reporting of race and ethnicity in genetic research. A journal’s expressed commitment to improving how race and ethnicity are used in genetic research, demonstrated by an editorial or in its instructions to authors, was the strongest predictor of following recommendations about reporting race and ethnicity. Journal impact factor had only a limited positive effect on attention to these issues, suggesting that editorial resources associated with higher impact factor journals are not sufficient to improve practices. Our findings reiterate that race and ethnicity variables are used inconsistently in genetic research, but also shed light on how journals might improve practices by highlighting the need for scientists to carefully scrutinize the use of these variables in their work.

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Notes

  1. Thomson ISI (Institute for Scientific Information) Web of Knowledge database tracks the citation history of journal article citations. Based on citation frequency, each journal is assigned an impact factor score that serves as a proxy measure for a journal’s importance to its field (Thomson ISI 2005a, b).

  2. Including black, white, Caucasian, European-American, Asian, Hispanic American, Mexican American, Native American, American Indian, Alaskan American, African American, Inuit, Gypsy (or Gypsies) Arab, and Jew. In late 2003 MEDLINE revised its MeSH terminology for race and ethnicity categories (Sankar 2003). The list of terms used here represents the pre-2003 MeSH terms, which was operative during most of the period covered by our sample. Its use by MEDLINE suggests a sufficient overlap with popular usage to warrant adoption here.

  3. Our article sample was created also to test differences between ISI journal categories, such as genetic and clinical. This analysis required that there be sufficient articles in these categories from similarly ranked journals, which is the reason that the number of articles in the high impact factor journal sample is considerably higher than the number in the general sample.

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Acknowledgments

This study was supported by a grant from the Public Health Service (R01-HG003191).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy, University of Pennsylvania, 3401 Market Street, Suite 320, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, USA

    Pamela Sankar

  2. Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics, Stanford University, 1215 Welch Road, Modular A, Stanford, CA, 94305-5417, USA

    Mildred K. Cho

  3. Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy, University of Pennsylvania, 3401 Market Street, Suite 320, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, USA

    Keri Monahan

  4. Jefferson Medical College, 1025 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19107, USA

    Kamila Nowak

Authors
  1. Pamela Sankar
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  2. Mildred K. Cho
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  3. Keri Monahan
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  4. Kamila Nowak
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Keri Monahan.

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Sankar, P., Cho, M.K., Monahan, K. et al. Reporting Race and Ethnicity in Genetics Research: Do Journal Recommendations or Resources Matter?. Sci Eng Ethics 21, 1353–1366 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-014-9596-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-014-9596-y

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