Springer Nature renames 21 journals to become gender-neutral

Springer Nature is to rename 21 of its journals to become more inclusive and gender-neutral in a commitment it has made with analytics company Clarivate. 

The organisations have agreed to rename 21 titles in the academic publisher’s German-language medical portfolio to make their system "more clearly inclusive". Clarivate will enable the journals to retain their indexing in Journal Citation Reports (JCR). 

These changes are being made because, when written in the German language, the titles for professions is usually identical to the masculine form.  

The new titles, coming into effect in June, will now focus on the specialist fields it is publishing research in rather than the job labels. For example, Der Internist (The Intern) will change to Die Innere Medizin (Internal Medicine) and Der Chirurg (The Surgeon) to Die Chirurgie (Surgery). The content and focus of each title will remain unchanged.

Paul Herrmann, director of journals and e-publishing at Springer Medizin, said: “We believe that diversity, equity and inclusion are essential to achieving Springer Nature’s mission to open doors to discovery. Medicine has long since ceased to be male-dominated. Across the medical profession today, the proportion of women is around 50 percent—in some areas it is significantly higher. It is important therefore that as one of the leading publishers in academic research we do our part to make gender equality in medicine more visible. Making sure that our journals properly and explicitly reflect the communities they are part of is a small, but important, step towards greater inclusion.”

Nandita Quaderi, editor-in-chief and v.p. editorial for web of science at Clarivate, said: “Clarivate continuously reviews and updates practices to remove barriers to broader inclusion. We are delighted that we can accommodate these positive changes to the journals’ names in a way that supports the continuity of their content and their earned scholarly reputation. In support of this initiative, we will make an exception to our current policy to avoid a break in Web of Science coverage or disruption to their published metrics in the JCR.”