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. 2016 Dec 29;14(12):e2000933.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.2000933. eCollection 2016 Dec.

Languages Are Still a Major Barrier to Global Science

Tatsuya Amano  1   2 , Juan P González-Varo  1 , William J Sutherland  1
Affiliations

Languages Are Still a Major Barrier to Global Science

Tatsuya Amano et al. PLoS Biol. .

Abstract

While it is recognized that language can pose a barrier to the transfer of scientific knowledge, the convergence on English as the global language of science may suggest that this problem has been resolved. However, our survey searching Google Scholar in 16 languages revealed that 35.6% of 75,513 scientific documents on biodiversity conservation published in 2014 were not in English. Ignoring such non-English knowledge can cause biases in our understanding of study systems. Furthermore, as publication in English has become prevalent, scientific knowledge is often unavailable in local languages. This hinders its use by field practitioners and policy makers for local environmental issues; 54% of protected area directors in Spain identified languages as a barrier. We urge scientific communities to make a more concerted effort to tackle this problem and propose potential approaches both for compiling non-English scientific knowledge effectively and for enhancing the multilingualization of new and existing knowledge available only in English for the users of such knowledge.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Figures

Fig 1
Fig 1. Waffle plot of the number of scientific documents in 2014 alone based on a search with two keywords—“biodiversity” and “conservation”—in 16 major languages on Google Scholar.
Each square represents 50 documents. The flags merely represent the language of each document, not where the work originated. See S1 Table for more detail.
Fig 2
Fig 2. Waffle plots of (A) the use of an English title and an English abstract in 94 scientific documents written in Spanish (sampled from the 9,520 documents searched in Fig 1); document types of (B) the 46 documents with neither an English title nor an English abstract and (C) those with an English title and/or an English abstract.
Each square represents one document.
Fig 3
Fig 3. Waffle plots of (A) the use of an English title and an English abstract in 80 scientific documents written in Japanese (sampled from the 474 documents searched in Fig 1); document types of (B) the 28 documents with neither an English title nor an English abstract and (C) those with an English title and/or an English abstract.
Each square represents one document.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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