The U-M Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP) creates opportunities for undergraduate students to get involved in research in collaboration with U-M faculty. Over the past academic year, Andries Coetzee has worked with undergraduate students Zora Tucker and Cora Rolfes through the UROP program on a project focused on the demographics of academic publication in linguistics. For this project, the team surveyed all authors who published in "Language", the flagship journal of the Linguistic Society of America, during the 10-year period of 2015-2024. The survey collected information from authors about their identities, country of residence, employment status, etc. The research team then compared the results from the survey with publicly available data on the composition of the linguistics community (from the National Science Foundation and the Linguistic Society of America).
Cora Rolfes and Zora Tucker presented an initial report on this project at the UROP Spring Research Symposium on April 23, 2024. In their report, they highlighted gender and ethnic disparities between the make-up of the linguistics community and the authors who publish in "Language". Notable results of their study found that relative to the broader linguistics community, individuals who identify as White and authors who identify as male are over-represented as authors in "Language". They also found that individuals who identify as female rather than male are more likely to be part of collaborative teams who co-author papers in the journal. The results of this investigation can support the Linguistic Society of America, and the broader linguistics community, in the development of publication programs that are representative of the full community of linguistics researchers.
