Citing prior work is an important step of scientific progress. However, when bias enters the process, consciously or unconsciously, it can lead to significant consequences. In this commentary, I explore the role of gender in citation bias and highlight its potential impact on equity and diversity in the scientific community.

Solid-state qubits are sensitive to their microscopic environment, causing the qubit properties to fluctuate on a wide range of timescales. The sub-Hz end of the spectrum is usually dealt with by repeated background calibrations, which bring considerable overhead. It is thus important to characterize and understand the low-frequency variations of the relevant qubit characteristics. In this study, we investigate the stability of spin qubit frequencies in the Si/SiGe quantum dot platform. We find that the calibrated qubit frequencies of a six-qubit device vary by up to ±100 MHz while performing a variety of experiments over a span of 912 days. These variations are sensitive to the precise voltage settings of the gate electrodes, however when these are kept constant to within 15 µV, the qubit frequencies vary by less than ±7 MHz over periods up to 36 days. During overnight scans, the qubit frequencies of ten qubits across two different devices show a standard deviation below 200 kHz within a 1-hour time window. The qubit frequency noise spectral density shows roughly a 1/f trend above 10⁻⁴ Hz and, strikingly, a steeper trend at even lower frequencies.