Proposal Title
Monolingualism in International Scientific Publishing: Collaboration or Imperialism?
Proposal Type
Individual Presentation
Location
Olscamp 201: Language, Voice, and Collaboration
Start Date
21-10-2017 2:15 PM
End Date
21-10-2017 3:30 PM
Abstract
This presentation considers the effects of monolingualism on international publishing rates from 1996-2015 in the natural and social sciences. Evidence is presented that indexed journals are becoming more nationally diverse, but that this diversity has entailed costs for individual scientists, journals, and particular academic disciplines outside of Anglophone communities.
Monolingualism in International Scientific Publishing: Collaboration or Imperialism?
Olscamp 201: Language, Voice, and Collaboration
This presentation considers the effects of monolingualism on international publishing rates from 1996-2015 in the natural and social sciences. Evidence is presented that indexed journals are becoming more nationally diverse, but that this diversity has entailed costs for individual scientists, journals, and particular academic disciplines outside of Anglophone communities.
Proposal
As English becomes entrenched as a global lingua franca, international publishing in the natural and social sciences has become increasingly monolingual. In this paper, bibliometric data are presented from Scimago’s index of Elsevier’s Scopus database as part of an investigation into the consequences of monolingualism on the international scientific community. The data show a general increase in indexed documents from 1996-2015 that has outpaced increases in world population and GWP, though with stark disparities between nations of the center and periphery (whether these are defined in economic or linguistic terms). However, there is also evidence of steady reductions in these disparities. It remains to be interpreted whether these trends represent an increase in global cooperation, or increased dominance by Anglophone communities in determining what is worthy of publication. While I argue that cautious optimism may be merited, it will also be noted that the costs of monolingualism are difficult to quantify in scientometric data. These costs include the prejudicial conflation of the concepts ‘international’, ‘English-medium’, and ‘high quality’, which has harmed individual scientists, ‘national’ journals, and even whole disciplines from the world's economic and linguistic periphery.