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arXiv · 2504.21100

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

Carolina Pradier·Lucía Céspedes·Vincent Larivière
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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.

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Carolina Pradier, Lucía Céspedes, Vincent Larivière. 2025-04-29. A smack of all neighbouring languages: How multilingual is scholarly communication?. https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.21100

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