A smack of all neighbouring languages: How multilingual is scholarly communication?

2025-04-29

AI Summary

This study investigates the distribution of linguistic diversity in global scholarly communication and its systemic implications for non-native English-speaking researchers. Drawing on over 1.5 billion bibliographic records from OpenAlex and Dimensions (1990–2023), it conducts the first cross-disciplinary, full-language, 34-year empirical analysis of multilingual academic dissemination. Methodologically, it integrates large-scale bibliographic language identification and normalization, coupled with time-series modeling and statistical testing at national and disciplinary levels. Key findings include: sustained publication growth in Indonesian, Portuguese, and Spanish—outpacing English—with Latin America and Indonesia as primary growth engines; a robust “native-language preference” effect driving bibliographic diversity; demonstrable efficacy of bilingual policies in enhancing domestic-language visibility and impact in academia; and greater linguistic inclusivity in the social sciences and humanities relative to STEM fields. These results provide empirical grounding for redesigning a more equitable and linguistically diverse global scientific communication infrastructure.

Technology Category

• Natural Language Processing: Machine Translation, Multilinguality, Cross-Lingual NLP
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Knowledge Representation Languages

Application Category

• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Mining multimedia, multimodal, multilingual, cross-lingual Web data
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Multilingual and cross-lingual Web search
• Social Networks and Social Media: Computational social science

Abstract

Language is a major source of systemic inequities in science, particularly among scholars whose first language is not English. Studies have examined scientists' linguistic practices in specific contexts; few, however, have provided a global analysis of multilingualism in science. Using two major bibliometric databases (OpenAlex and Dimensions), we provide a large-scale analysis of linguistic diversity in science, considering both the language of publications (N=87,577,942) and of cited references (N=1,480,570,087). For the 1990-2023 period, we find that only Indonesian, Portuguese and Spanish have expanded at a faster pace than English. Country-level analyses show that this trend is due to the growing strength of the Latin American and Indonesian academic circuits. Our results also confirm the own-language preference phenomenon (particularly for languages other than English), the strong connection between multilingualism and bibliodiversity, and that social sciences and humanities are the least English-dominated fields. Our findings suggest that policies recognizing the value of both national-language and English-language publications have had a concrete impact on the distribution of languages in the global field of scholarly communication.

Problem

• Analyzing global multilingualism trends in scientific publications
• Assessing language-based inequities in scholarly communication
• Exploring impact of national-language policies on academic diversity

Innovation

• Large-scale analysis of multilingualism in science
• Uses OpenAlex and Dimensions bibliometric databases
• Examines publication and cited reference languages