East, West, or Neither? Ancestry Categories in Scholarly Publishing Surveys

In 2022, a coalition of 52 scholarly publishers representing more than 15,000 journals endorsed a standardised questionnaire on ethnic origins, ancestry, and race. This Opinion tests whether that questionnaire’s ancestry item follows the geographic rationale its own designers cite for it, using a documentary audit against the United Nations M49 geoscheme. The wording refers to ancestry and ethnic origins, but the response options record coarse geographic origin. The European categories make the problem especially visible. The instrument offers only “Western Europe” and “Eastern Europe”, omits Southern Europe, and lists Greece, Sweden, and the United Kingdom as being part of Western Europe, although UN M49 places Greece in Southern Europe and Sweden and the United Kingdom in Northern Europe. Several other options depart from M49 in distinct ways, including a label–example mismatch, deliberate combinations of adjacent subregions, and aggregation to a higher regional level. These inconsistencies do not validate M49 as an ancestry taxonomy. They show that the questionnaire uses a hybrid, insufficiently documented geography instead of following its stated rationale consistently. Public evidence is not sufficient to demonstrate that respondents interpret the resulting categories consistently across countries and languages. Publishers should define the construct being measured, separate collection from reporting, collect sufficient detail before aggregation, and test revised questions across countries and languages.