Abstract
Having English as a global language that is used in international relations, for global communications and by the majority of the media represents an enormous advantage. Notwithstanding this, this paper argues that there is a dramatic and hitherto largely underestimated language effect in the bibliometric, citation-based measurements of research performance in law and the social sciences, and a widely overlooked impact on these fields in the global South. It explores the idea that English as a global language ‘not only contributes to the advancement of science but also hampers its progress by disregarding the cognitive potential of other languages’ (Ammon, World Social Science Report: Knowledge Divides. UNESCO, 2010). English as the language of science creates a hierarchy of knowledge that favors knowledge produced in Anglophone countries and promotes the success of native English-speaking scholars.
Linguistic hegemony is a form of power that empowers some while disempowering others.
(Short et al. 2001: 1)
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Notes
- 1.
English is the first language of about 400 million people in 53 countries—what Crystal (1997: 54) calls the Inner Circle, in terms of Kachru’s ‘concentric circles’ (1986). English is the additional language of another 300 million (the Outer Circle, e.g., India, Hong Kong, Nigeria, Singapore) and the language taught as a foreign language for approximately 1000 million (the Expanding Circle, e.g., Russia, China, Western Europe).
- 2.
The Italians coined the term lingua franca in the seventeenth century. At that time, it represented a mixture of Italian with French, Greek, Arabic and Spanish used in the eastern Mediterranean primarily as the language of commerce. The term literally means ‘Frankish tongue’, Franks being the common designation for all Western Europeans since the twelfth century.
- 3.
This is the term popularized by Phillipson (1992) to overcome the illusion of sameness created by the use of a common language.
- 4.
Law and social sciences add another problem, related to the fact that both disciplines are not perceived as integrated scientific communities, organized by prestige hierarchies according to importance and quality of research contributions made visible in common journals, in the same way natural sciences are. The role of schools of thinking is too important. Therefore, surveys show a rather pluralistic picture regarding scientific paradigms and only a moderate degree of consensus among researchers (Hicks 1999; Andersen 2000). This ‘lack of cognitive consensus’ makes the peer review process ‘more complex, more subjective, and less reliable’ (Bordons and Gómez 2004: 191–192). It is also associated with a higher proportion of books in these fields’ literature, because journal publishing is seen both as a signal of greater consensus and as a unifying force (Pierce 1987).
- 5.
Researchers’ publication experiences as corresponding authors of articles in English are strongly related to their scientific domain. I do not pretend to make them generalizable to other domains.
- 6.
The Science Citation Index (SCI) was created in 1963. Together with the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) and the Arts & Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI), SCI is today part of the Web of Science (WoS). Scopus was created in 2004. Both databases remain today the main sources for citation data.
- 7.
In particular, the impact factor has become in recent years the chief quantitative measure of the quality not only of a journal and its articles, but also of the researchers who wrote these articles and even the institution they work in and the country in which they live. It provides material for studying the prestige of academics, the importance of universities and the efficiency of entire countries’ scientific research. On its limitations, according to sociological and statistical factors, such as the subject area of the journal, the type of journal, the average number of authors per paper, the size of the journal and the size of the citation measurement window (Amin and Mabe 2000). According to Amin and Mabe, the usefulness of journal impact factors for evaluating individual scientists is ‘highly suspect’, concluding that ‘they are not a direct measure of quality and must be used with considerable care’ (2000: 6).
- 8.
As Weingart and Schwechheimer (2007: 6) state:
It is consensus among specialists of bibliometrics that citations represent visibility. It is an additional step to assume that visibility is correlated with quality. An article may be cited and therefore visible because its topic is highly fashionable, because its content is provocative or scandalously wrong, because its author is famous and being cited conveys his/her authority in the cited article etc. None of these reasons for citation are necessarily linked to quality of research….
Nevertheless, many studies have demonstrated that there is a strong correlation between citation frequencies and other indicators of quality or influence, such as awards, grants, research funding, editorship of major journals and peer group ratings (Baird and Oppenheim 1994; Andersen 2000; Holmes and Oppenheim 2001).
- 9.
Sectorial studies show that French, German, Portuguese and Spanish journals contain chiefly national authors, and these also constitute the largest group of persons citing them. Usually, the second largest group consists of researchers from the same language area (e.g., Canadians, Belgians and Swiss in the case of French journals, Swiss and Austrians in the case of German journals and South American researchers for Portuguese and Spanish journals), even though there is a greater international element among their citations than among their authorship (Bajerski 2011).
- 10.
Of course, one could say that English is dominant in the bibliometric databases simply because it is the favored language for high-quality research, thus making the overrepresentation of English a mere reflection of scientific dynamics, as opined by Moed et al. (2002) or Zitt et al. (2003). From this perspective, research not covered by these databases fails to reach the relevance threshold that would warrant closer evaluation. But, as Archambault et al. (2006: 339) put it:
defining the quality of academic research as what is interesting from an international perspective is far from obvious, as it implicitly accept the norm of the physical sciences and thus raises important normative questions.
Moreover, it is questionable whether research articles written in languages other than English are of lower quality in such a high proportion as the bias observed in our data. In fact, it may be difficult to rely solely on Thomson Scientific to be the impartial judge of what is and is not quality research output, without going into a circular argument. This position is even more doubtful considering Thomson Scientific self admitted inability to analyse the content of journals in language other than English […].
In fact, it is clearly stated on the Repository Evaluation, Selection, and Coverage Policies for the Data Citation Index within Thomson Reuters Web of Knowledge (Thomson Reuters 2012), available at Thomson Reuters’ website:
English is the universal language of science at this time in history. It is for this reason that Thomson Reuters focuses on repositories that publish metadata in English or, at the very least, allow provision of sufficient descriptive (metadata) information in English. Some repositories covered in Data Citation Index publish only metadata descriptions in English with the actual data in another language. However, going forward, it is clear that the repositories most important to the international research community will publish data in English. This is especially true in the natural sciences. In addition, all repositories must have metadata and citations in the Roman alphabet. (Thomson Reuters 2012: 3)
Something similar can be found in Elsevier’s Scopus Content Coverage Guide (2016), available at Elsevier’s website:
Global coverage
Scopus coverage is global by design to best serve researchers’ needs and ensure that relevant scientific information is not omitted from the database. Titles from all geographical regions are covered, including non-English titles as long as English abstracts can be provided with the articles. (Elsevier 2016: 20)
Article selection includes the criteria, ‘Be relevant and readable for an international audience (e.g., have references in Roman script and English language abstracts and titles) (Elsevier 2016: 17)’. Elsevier (2016) also considers an English language journal homepage as relevant criteria regarding online availability.
- 11.
The percentage is bigger than the one found by Garfield and Welljams-Dorof (1990: 13–14) looking at the Institute for Scientific Information Data’s 1984–1988 data for Science Citation Index, Social Sciences Citation Index and the Arts & Humanities Citation Index, in which they found that ‘English clearly predominates, with about 760,000, or 85 percent of the total, written in English’.
- 12.
Swales (1990: 29) uses this notion to describe a group of individuals defined by six characteristics: ‘common goals, participatory mechanisms, information exchange, community-specific genres, a highly specialized terminology and a high general level of expertise’. As Uzuner (2008: 258) pointed out, ‘[s]uch a definition implies that one’s entry into such communities rests upon his/her ability to meet the criteria set for them’. Therefore, the notion of discourse community is a point of departure to explain and predict the problems and challenges nonnative scholars face in their attempts to initiate themselves into the Anglophone international academic community.
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Faraldo-Cabana, P. (2018). Research Excellence and Anglophone Dominance: The Case of Law, Criminology and Social Science. In: Carrington, K., Hogg, R., Scott, J., Sozzo, M. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Criminology and the Global South. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65021-0_9
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