The results from the Geographic Bias Tool are meant for you to be able to review and reflect on the current balance of the geographic origin of journal articles on your reading lists. The next step is to consider how meaningful action can be taken. This section covers some strategies to help improve the geographic diversity of your reading list at your own pace and with your own teaching styles and goals. You can choose to enact all these changes, some of them, or none – taking action will look different for everyone.

Frequently asked questions

Start small

There is no need to restart your reading list from scratch. Here are some small steps to help you get started:

  • Add a couple of articles from different / underrepresented regions
  • Supplement some of the existing readings with regionally relevant case studies 
  • Encourage students to look at these different perspectives by highlighting one of these new articles
Look for alternative sources

There is no need to completely ignore looking at articles from HICs, but you can also try looking at some other sources to ensure diverse voices are represented. Here are some ways:

1. Use platforms such as:

  • AJOL – African Journals Online
  • SciELO – Latin American Journals
  • DOAJ – Directory of open access journals 
  • J-STAGE – Japanese science and technology information aggregator 

2. Talk to your subject librarians to help identify some of these sources and other databases you can try investigating

3. Add the regions into your searches for articles within your discipline, this can help to refine the search

4. Consider incorporating and directing students to Open Educational Resources (OER). OERs are teaching and learning materials such as textbooks and teaching notes released under an open license. You can access some OERs via the Pressbooks Directory, or the Open Textbook Library.  

Broaden case study examples

Even if primary reading materials are from HICs, your teaching content can still reflect geographic diversity by:

  • Including case studies, data sets and examples from underrepresented countries in lectures
  • Encouraging students to look at the comparisons between local and global case studies
  • Inviting students to lead presentations on innovations in different regions across the world to foster their interest and understanding 
Collaborate with others
  • Talk to colleagues in your department and across different departments to share resources and compare ideas
  • Use module review periods as a chance to refresh the materials and make them more contextually relevant
  • Ask for student feedback and what perspectives they may want to see represented
We have a large international student cohort. I think we should try our best to engage with them—and part of that is looking beyond the West. The West isn’t the end all of knowledge Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) Coordinator
Document and celebrate your changes
  • Keep a note of changes you have made or are planning to make
  • Consider including a short statement in your syllabus about how the reading list is regionally diverse to inform and teach students about the concept of geographical bias
  • Share success stories within your department to encourage change and drive your colleagues to try out the same