Why I'm offering to do this
I built Pinakes, an open index of this field's scholarship, and it gets better in direct proportion to how much of the field's metadata exists in a form it can read. When your journal deposits its reference lists, my tool improves. So I am not a disinterested party here, and it seems better to say so up front than to leave you to find out. I'd argue the interest is also the best guarantee you have about the quality of the work. A sloppy deposit doesn't disappear into your records and stay there; it ends up in my index, where I have to look at it and where it could skew the analyses Pinakes' tools are capable of producing.
What an index can't see
Pinakes currently (as of 2026-08-31) holds 54,231 articles across 55 journals, and 519,154 citation edges of which 10.9 percent resolve to something inside the index. Roughly 29 of those journals deposit reference lists. The rest appear in search results and on the publication timeline, then drop out of every citation view the index can build — they have deposited no references for it to read.
Bibliometrics has a name for an article that goes unread for years and then becomes central: a sleeping beauty. Pinakes can find them, which is one of the more interesting things it does. It can also invent them. If an article is widely cited but the journals citing it have never deposited their references, the article looks asleep when it isn't asleep at all; it's being cited in places the index can't see.
Every citation analysis of this field currently carries that distortion. It falls on the field's own open-access journals, on the venues that publish without a commercial press behind them, and on everything published before roughly 2000. Any claim about who influenced whom, which conversations connect to which, or whose work holds a subfield together is being made on a record with those absences built into it, at least if you're approaching that claim from a quantitative bibliometric perspective.
What a deposited reference list makes possible
Reference lists are the raw material for every relational tool in Pinakes. Co-citation shows which works get cited together often enough to constitute a conversation. Bibliographic coupling finds articles drawing on the same sources without citing each other. Centrality measures identify the work holding a subfield together, and main path analysis traces how an idea moved from one article to the next across decades. Community detection finds clusters the field hasn't named. Citation half-life shows how long work in a given venue stays in circulation.
None of those run on articles; rather, they run on citation counts, and a journal that hasn't deposited its references participates in none of these analyses.
Citational justice is the case I would put to an editorial team or board first. This field has a long history of absorbing foundational work by women and by scholars of color into its common sense and then losing the practice of citing that work — a pattern Lewis and Lockhart (forthcoming Composition Studies) document in one journal's self-audit of its own citational practice, and one Moore et al. document across technical and professional communication more broadly. A citation graph makes that kind of asymmetry visible in quantitative terms and lets an editorial team or board check its own record against it. Without deposited reference lists, the audit can't be run at all.
The objections to bibliometrics are real. Acknowledgement isn't influence, scholarship isn't the only way a field constitutes itself, power tends to reward power, and a visualization can reify the thing it claims to describe. I'd still argue we could do more of this work as a field, alongside the critical bibliometric literacy that ought to come with it. Neither is possible on a record this incomplete.
The exchange
Better deposits produce a better index. A better index produces better citation visibility for your journal and for your authors, whose work becomes traceable in OpenAlex, in Scopus-adjacent tooling, in Zotero, and in every service that reads Crossref rather than crawling your site and hoping. Both of those serve the field before they serve either of us.