Thread by @petersuber

Update. Publishers may choose English because it's a lingua franca for science, intelligible to a larger audience. Or they may do it to increase their #JIF. (And of course the two motives may be related.) Research from Brazil.
scielo.br/scielo.php?scr…

Update. Confirmation that writing outside your native language (unless you are extremely proficient) triggers linguistic bias from native speakers.
sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

1/ Update. Most email solicitations from predatory journals use weak English. This study confirms my experience.
paperity.org/p/174009175/ma…

But...

2/ But be careful about concluding that most journals using weak English (in email solicitations or web pages) are predatory. Some could be honest journals published in English, for understandable reasons, by scholars whose first language is not English.

Update. "One of the main limiting factors...[experienced by researchers preparing articles for biomedical journals] has been limited skills in English writing and editing."
pmj.bmj.com/content/early/…

Update. "Surveys of...Spanish-speaking...& Mandarin Chinese-speaking researchers revealed that [they] found it significantly more difficult to write...articles in English than in their native tongues [&] increased their dissatisfaction and anxiety."
sciencemag.org/careers/2020/1…

Update. Call for standardizing multilingual metadata.
firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/…

Update. This "systematic review and meta-analysis" limited itself to studies written in English. Understandable, regrettable, and probably very common.
mdpi.com/2077-0383/9/5/…

Update. "This project seeks to conduct language translation on metadata labels for research publications, attribution data, & clinical trials…to make data about medical research queriable in underserved languages through Wikidata and the Linked Open Web."
riojournal.com/article/66490/

Update. "We [scientists who speak English as a second language] shoulder an extra career challenge: not only must we gain command of our science, but we must also be able to write to professional standards in a foreign language."
nature.com/articles/d4158…

Update. Google Scholar shows 3,700,000 papers on climate change written in English, "three times more than Mandarin Chinese & French combined. Among the top 10 countries most vulnerable to climate change, only one is majority English-speaking (Canada)."
smithsonianmag.com/blogs/conserva…

Update. "Our results show that synthesising non-English-language studies is key to overcoming the widespread lack of local, context-dependent evidence and facilitating evidence-based conservation globally."
biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

Update "Only 11 of 38 European countries had any medical publications in [their] national language that were referenced in MEDLINE."
ebooks.iospress.nl/doi/10.3233/SH…

Update. "If everyone uses the same language, there is less friction…[But] the English-language conquest is not more efficient than polyglot science – it is just differently inefficient. There’s still a lot of language‑learning and translation going on."
aeon.co/essays/how-did…

Update. "I have rec'd…peer-review feedback recommending that a ‘native English speaker’…[proofread] my manuscript…Yet…English is my first language…[Some reviewers who gave this feedback] did not themselves show a strong competence in written English."
insights.uksg.org/articles/10.16…

Update. Good science is more important than good English. But "science too often demands that non-native English-speaking academics focus on learning to speak and write in English, which drastically disadvantages them." Hence....
nature.com/articles/d4158…

Update. "No one can deny that the dominance of the English language in academia has many cost-saving & logistic benefits. Still, we should also be aware [that] such dominance…jeopardises the quality of research around the globe."
content.yudu.com/web/tzly/0A448…

Update. In addition to providing new data on the problem of monolingualism in science, the authors propose #openscience as part of the solution.
english.elpais.com/usa/2021-07-30…

Update. "Our findings indicate that Finnish language publications are particularly impt for reaching students, citizens, experts & politicians. Thus #openaccess to publications in national languages is vital for the local relevance & outreach of research."
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/le…

Update. National language journals “may not be able to transition to #openaccess…w/o losing income…One way to enable OA…is to create a…platform for hosting…the most impt local journals, an example of which has been recently implemented in Norway.”
asistdl.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/as…

Update. "As English has become the international, cross-border language of science, it may have ceased to be the property of the native speaker researchers, who constitute a small minority in the community."
tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…

Update. This is just to ensure that the present thread is associated with the hashtags #MultilingualResearch and #Multilingualism.

Update. "While English-language journals have seen huge increases in global submissions over the last 10 years, the pool of experts being used to review the literature largely remains with US and European-based reviewers."
scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2021/08/16/rev…

Update. "The best automatic translation systems are now good enough to allow people to choose the language in which they read and write to the platform."
scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2021/08/18/pos…

Important if true. But is it true?

Update. "English is the dominant language of environmental…conservation. But unless people understand…specific…concepts & can talk about them in their home languages, they can feel disconnected from govt efforts to preserve ecosystems & species."
nature.com/articles/d4158…

Update. "The current bias in the STEM academy [in favor of English]…is detrimental to the continuity and evolution of STEM research." (This article is published in 6 languages.)
sciencepolicyjournal.org/article_103812…

Update (from 2008). Emerging Themes in Epidemiology suggests 4 ways to support #MultilingualResearch, and adopts one itself: It will publish "translations of abstracts or full texts by authors as Additional files."
ete-online.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.11…

Update. @wikidata and @wikifunctions could help different language versions of @Wikipedia stay in sync on facts.
slate.com/technology/202…

Update. Just making sure this thread on #MultilingualResearch includes this tweet from June 2021

https://twitter.com/petersuber/status/1404071175458803715

Update. @Stanford has launched a discussion forum on multilingual digital humanities (#dh).
mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listin…

"The nuanced language of the te Reo [Maori] descriptions was an essential part of the paper & they withdrew the article…despite the extra work it would take to stand their ground…Happily, the paper found a new home… delighted to incorporate the te Reo."
optimistdaily.com/2021/09/decolo…

Update. "For scientists who do not speak English…writing a paper in their first language still does not solve the issue [since they must still] conduct a thorough review of existing literature [much or most of which is in English]."
carbonbrief.org/analysis-the-l…

Update (from 2019). Personal experiences from seven scientists whose first language is not English.
nature.com/articles/d4158…

Update (from 2017). "Articles published in English have a higher number of citations than those published in other languages, when the effect of journal, year of publication, and paper length are statistically controlled."
link.springer.com/article/10.100…

Update. Don't assume that all important results are published in English. "We show that non-English-language studies provide crucial evidence for informing global biodiversity conservation."
journals.plos.org/plosbiology/ar…

Update. From the authors' summary of the article above: "Many…scientific breakthroughs were originally published in a language other than English. The structure of a Nobel Prize-winning antimalarial drug was first published in 1977 in simplified Chinese."
theconversation.com/the-english-la…

Update. The "structural disadvantage [for non-native speakers in English philosophy journals] deserves closer philosophical & empirical attention. We owe this to current & future members of our…community for whom English is not their native language."
dailynous.com/2021/10/13/lev…

Update. Diamond or no-APC #openaccess journals are multilingual 2.7x more often than APC-based OA journals. In the @DOAJplus: 38% of no-APC v. 14% of APC-based journals.
zenodo.org/record/4558704

For more data on multilingual no-APC journals, see §1.4.3, tables 8-11.

Update. English-language articles quoting non-English speakers tend to publish the quotations in English alone. This piece recommends publishing them in both the speaker's native language and English.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/no…

Update. I wish this study had not limited itself to English-language articles. It would be good to compare the growth of English-language articles to the growth of non-English articles in the BRICS countries.
emerald.com/insight/conten…

Update. "The dominance of…articles in English as well as the paucity of OA publications indexed in international databases (compared to those in national or regional databases) may have been due to the greater weighting assigned to such publications."
ese.arphahub.com/article/59032/

Update. 24% of Journal.fi users are non-academics. Professional researchers used English-language articles more than Finnish or Swedish articles. For students, it was the reverse.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.10…

Update. Outside English-speaking countries, the dominance of English is spreading from research publications to university courses. (#paywalled)
timeshighereducation.com/news/big-five-…

Update from Nov 2019. "There was a positive relationship between #JIFs [journal impact factors] and publication language…Most countries with smaller research capabilities have still chosen English as the standard language of their research journals."
sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

Update from 2018: "I propose balanced multilingualism as a basis for governing the tensions between strategies for internationalization and excellence in research on the one hand and strategies for societal relevance and participation on the other."
bid.ub.edu/en/40/sivertse…

Update. Lingua franca nuances: In Poland there are academic "domains where English fluency is an asset & 'black holes' (bureaucratic issues, teaching, research collaboration) where English language communication is either impossible or impeded."
sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

Update. Non-native speakers of English can face discrimination for their accents, regardless of their proficiency.
theconversation.com/heres-why-peop…

Update. Chinese journals published in English have much stronger #opendata policies than Chinese journals published in Chinese. (The article also identifies other journal differences that correlate with the strength of their data-sharing policies.)
…y-wiley-com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/doi/epdf/10.10…

Update. "There is some anecdotal evidence that publication in Chinese journals is shifting from Mandarin to English but participants [in a Dec 2020 @cni_org meeting] were not aware of good comprehensive data on this."
cni.org/wp-content/upl…

Update. The dominance of English in STEM fields "is detrimental to the continuity & evolution of STEM research. We [recommend US govt] infrastructure that standardizes & facilitates the language translation process & hosting of multilingual publications."
sciencepolicyjournal.org/article_103812…

Update, new OA journal on indigenous languages: Publishing in English about non-English languages worked "against the fair dissemination of info to the…communities we are writing about. So we wanted to make sure we could pub in a variety of languages."
around.uoregon.edu/content/new-jo…

Update from @LProofreading. "We are group of #ECR in #linguistics concerned with linguistic discrimination in #academic #publishing. We propose to develop a community-based solution to fight it."

https://twitter.com/LProofreading/status/1488962849762390017

Update. This meta-analysis deliberately limited its scope to English-language articles. I suspect that most others do the same without saying so. Has anyone studied how often meta-analyses adopt this limitation?
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14…

Update. China's retreat from monetary incentives to publish in English-language journals with high journal impact factors (#JIFs) is not having a large short-term effect. Many researchers want to publish in those journals even without the old incentives.
link.springer.com/article/10.105…

Update. "In this position paper, we set out to challenge both the reality and desirability of continuing to configure academic/scientific knowledge production and exchange as an ‘English Only’ space."
cambridge.org/core/journals/…

More from the study above. Mainstream indices like WoS & Scopus suggest that 90% of published journal articles are in English. But those are the indices most likely to exclude non-English journals. For example, they cover only 2/3 of the journals listed in UlrichsWeb.

Update. "This paper…details 3 major ways in which content differences between language editions [of @Wikipedia] arise…and recommendations for good practices when using multilingual and multimodal data for research and modeling."
arxiv.org/abs/2204.02483

Update. "We…provide recommendations on how multilingualism can be taken into account at all stages and across different types of qualitative and quantitative research assessment procedures." #paywalled.
elgaronline.com/view/edcoll/97…

Update. "The article compares selected entries on @Wikipedia concerning significant historical events in three language versions: Belarusian, Lithuanian, & Polish…[& notes] the prevalence of 'local' points of view on controversial historical events."
cejsh.icm.edu.pl/cejsh/element/…

Update. An argument for "balanced multilingualism" & "taking language into account in all aspects of research assessment without prioritizing scholarly communication in any language over publications in other languages."
repository.uantwerpen.be/docstore/d:iru… (warning, forced download)

Update. "African languages are barely represented in technology & research…@lanfrica is a language-focused search engine that makes it fast & easy to find information on the Internet about resources relating to African languages."
lanfrica.com/about

Update. "Spanish and Portuguese together represent more than 800 million speakers…, 11% of the world’s population, but only 1% of globally indexed scientific output is published in these two languages."
lodivalleynews.com/for-open-and-a…

Update. "The Council of the European Union…welcomes initiatives to promote multilingualism, such as the Helsinki initiative on multilingualism in scholarly communication."
data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/S…

Update. "What is the role of [English-language] academic journals in helping non-native English speaking authors to have their best chance at publication without their research findings being overlooked due to poor language usage?" Three recommendations.
blog.scholasticahq.com/post/ways-acad…

Update. The @EUCouncil "welcomes initiatives to promote #multilingualism, such as the Helsinki initiative on multilingualism in scholarly communication...invites the Commission & the Member States to experiment with multilingualism, on a voluntary basis."
consilium.europa.eu/media/56958/st…

Update. "We [@COKIproject] have mapped the 122 million objects in Crossref up to the end of May 2022 to languages (based on titles and abstracts, where available) and done an initial analysis. The results are a mix of the expected and surprising."
openknowledge.community/language-diver…

Update. The spread of "national [#openaccess] repositories" will help us study thematic "differences between locally published research in non-English speaking contexts and English-speaking international authors."
link.springer.com/article/10.100…

Update. "In many countries, the ten most downloaded books [from @OAPENbooks] are written in non-English languages."
insights.uksg.org/articles/10.16…

Update. We "investigate NLP & Machine Translation approaches…to foster multilingual access & discovery to SSH content across different languages…[We created an open dataset] of multilingual metadata concepts."
lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lr…

Update. Google's translation of the Portuguese: "The publication of bilingual and multilingual articles is a potential, inexpensive solution that has been offered for years by the Scientific Electronic Library On-line (SciELO)."
scielo.br/j/jvb/a/8g95sS…

Update. Anecdote from piece above: "German scientists…identified a significant causal relationship between smoking & lung cancer in the…1930s, a finding ignored by the scientific community for more than three decades, until British & American scientists rediscovered this link."

Update. "@Meta's grand vision is unlikely to be realised…because of #copyright. Unless online material is released under a permissive licence such as [those from] @creativecommons, it will be necessary to obtain permission from the copyright holder."
walledculture.org/why-metas-proj…

Update. "Our research demonstrates that while EAL [English as an additional language] scholars are under significant pressure to publish in English, they are not provided with the necessary resources to bring their papers to publication."
timeshighereducation.com/blog/we-must-e…

Update (missed this one from 2014): English-language journal editors said their journals provided clear instructions to authors more than twice as often as their non-English-speaking authors (76% v. 32%).
blog.scielo.org/en/2014/05/19/…

Update from 2015. "A single shared language is useful for an endeavor as collaborative & universal as science. But if you are not a native speaker…how difficult it must be to reach a 'eureka' moment but feel that the words are inadequate to describe it."
slate.com/technology/201…

Update from 2019: "There is…evidence for significant linguistic bias when journals receive a manuscript written in poor English…[creating] an impression that the research they discuss is also sub-standard."
blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocial…

Update: "The lack of specific strategies regarding language use in research may result in the imposition of English and in the displacement of local languages."
sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

Update. Chinese incentives to publish in international English-language journals are causing Chinese research to be read and cited less by Chinese researchers.
link.springer.com/article/10.100…

Update. "We outline actions that individuals and institutions can take to support multilingual science and scientists, including structural changes that encourage and value translating scientific literature."
academic.oup.com/bioscience/art…

Update. I second @karimjerbineuro's appreciation of "the extra work, time & energy that students + researchers around the world, whose native language is not English, need to put into writing academic papers + giving talks in English."

https://twitter.com/karimjerbineuro/status/1584498595449176071

Update. I welcome the @COAR_eV recommendations on #repository support for #multilingual research.
coar-repositories.org/news-updates/c…

Update. Only 3% of Dutch medical guidelines refer to research articles written in Dutch.
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36300474/

Update. "This study identified eight factors that contributed to the success of…two #multilingual digital libraries [World Digital Library & Digital Library of the Caribbean] and eight technical and operational challenges they have faced." #paywalled
emerald.com/insight/conten…

Update. "US researchers do not build as readily on the [English-language] work of Chinese researchers, relative to the work of other foreign scientists, even in a setting where Chinese scientists have long excelled."
nber.org/papers/w30772

Update. "Although the publishing patterns of CEE…journals in the field of language and linguistics are international, multilingual publishing in languages other than English ensures the continuity of local research traditions."
link.springer.com/article/10.100…

Update. I just gave an interview in which I spoke at length about #MultilingualResearch. "The dominance of one language creates obstacles, stress, expense & rejection for excellent scholars whose first language happens not to be the lingua franca."
dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/37373…

Update. "The cognitive sciences have been dominated by English-speaking researchers studying other English speakers…However, English differs from other languages in ways that have consequences for the whole of the cognitive sciences."
cell.com/trends/cogniti…

Update. "Rooryck’s message was clear: 'Funders and universities should value multilingual publication in the same way as publication in English. We should convince PhD students of this too. Publication in English should not be associated with prestige.'"
vastuullinentiede.fi/en/news/public…

Update. "The Organization of Ibero-American States… reported that, in 2020, 95% of all articles published in scientific journals were written in English and only 1% in Spanish or Portuguese."
scielo.br/j/ts/a/zwPRYVh…

Update. @ugc_india created a list of #Indian #SSH journals publishing in 15 Indian languages. One purpose was to purge predatory journals. Another was to highlight the existence of the rest, since international databases omit them.
emerald.com/insight/conten…
(#paywalled)

Update. "44% of Finnish peer-reviewed journals and series are published in Finnish…#Diamond #OpenAccess journals are much more multilingual than, for example, [OA] journals which charge #APCs."
julkaisufoorumi.fi/en/news/diamon…

Update. "While English is only the native language of 7.3% of the world's population and less than 20% can speak the language, nearly 75% of all scientific publications are English."
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14…

Update. Case study of the two-year transition to fully bilingual publication (Spanish and English) by the Chilean medical journal, @Medwave_cl.
doi.org/10.1002/leap.1…

Update. "To some, this problem [writing in English when it's not your native language] may appear to be a minor one. However, if good research fails to find its way to publication – the barrier being the language – ultimately it is a loss for science."
blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocial…

Update. "Journals & publishers have made little progress toward beginning to recognize or reduce language barriers. Counter to our predictions, journals associated w/ scientific societies did not…have more inclusive policies [than] non-society journals."
academic.oup.com/iob/article/5/…

Update. A new study of the #CulturalHeritage research indexed in #WOS finds it skewed toward English-language research and the global #north. The authors conclude that this is partly due to the research and partly due to what is indexed in #WOS.
nature.com/articles/s4159…

Update. "By ignoring non-English-language science, international assessments may overlook important information on local and/or regional biodiversity."
nature.com/articles/s4189…

Update. "Research in languages other than English is critically important for #biodiversity conservation & shockingly under-utilized globally."
phys.org/news/2023-03-s…

@threadreaderapp unroll