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English is now considered the common language, or 'lingua franca', of global science. All major scientific journals seemingly publish in English, despite the fact that their pages contain research from across the globe.
However, a new study suggests that over a third of new scientific reports are published in languages other than English, which can result in these findings being overlooked - contributing to biases in our understanding.
As well as the international community missing important science, language hinders new findings getting through to practitioners in the field say researchers from the University of Cambridge.
They argue that whenever science is only published in one language, including solely in English, barriers to the transfer of knowledge are created.
The Cambridge researchers call on scientific journals to publish basic summaries of a study's key findings in multiple languages, and universities and funding bodies to encourage translations as part of their 'outreach' evaluation criteria.
(Score: 2) by fadrian on Monday January 02 2017, @03:10AM
I would assume that most of these papers are from China. If this is the case, the fact that they are not well known might be a blessing as Chinese academic publishing is rife with fake journals and bad papers, together with all of the quality issues inherent in all academic publishing in this "publish or perish" world.
That is all.
(Score: 3, Informative) by JNCF on Monday January 02 2017, @04:52AM
I would assume that most of these papers are from China.
From TFA:
Of the over 75,000 documents, including journal articles, books and theses, some 35.6% were not in English. Of these, the majority was in Spanish (12.6%) or Portuguese (10.3%). Simplified Chinese made up 6%, and 3% were in French.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 02 2017, @06:51AM
I guess when they were insisting on English as a lingua franca, they did not include reading comprehension.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 02 2017, @06:15PM
There's probably a fair bit of high quality stuff done by Japanese scientists in Japanese.
BTW there's English and there's Modern Scientific English. I wonder if some of the famous old stuff would get rejected today :).