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posted by janrinok on Monday January 02 2017, @01:44AM   Printer-friendly
from the brush-up-your-esperanto dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 2) by martyb on Monday January 02 2017, @03:36AM

    by martyb (76) Subscriber Badge on Monday January 02 2017, @03:36AM (#448373) Journal
    ISTR when I was a student, i was told the majority of journal articles were historically in German. After WWII, and especially with the "space race", that gradually changed over to English.
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  • (Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Monday January 02 2017, @04:59PM

    by bzipitidoo (4388) on Monday January 02 2017, @04:59PM (#448562) Journal

    Euler (1707-1783), resident in Prussia for 25 years, wrote his research papers in Latin. Newton (1643-1726) and Descartes (1596-1650) also wrote their works in Latin.