Bibliometric analysis of multi-language veterinary journals

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate the association between language and total number of citations found among documents in journals written in English and other languages. We selected all the journals clustered together in the Journal Citation Reports 2014 under the subject category "Veterinary Sciences" and downloaded all the data registered between 1994-2013 by Web of Science for the journals that stated publishing documents in languages other than English. We classified each of these journals by quartile and extracted information regarding their impact factor, language(s) stated, country of origin, total number of documents published, total number of reviews published, percentage of documents published in English and the quartile in which each journal ranked. Of the 48,118 documents published by the 28 journals analyzed, 55.8% were published in English. Interestingly, although most of the journals state being multi-language, most documents published in quartile 1 journals were in English (an average of 99.2%), while the percentage was 93.1% in quartile 2 journals, 62.1% in quartile 3 journals and 27.4% in quartile 4 journals. We also confirmed that citation distribution in these journals was highly skewed. The results of this study suggest that journals should consider adopting English as the main language as this will increase citation counts and the impact factor of the journal. Keywords:Bibliometric. Impact factor. Multi-language. Scientific journal. Veterinary science. Resumo O objetivo deste estudo foi investigar a associação entre a escolha do idioma e o número de citações, a partir da análise de revistas publicadas em inglês e em outras línguas. Foram selecionadas as revistas agrupadas no Journal Citation Reports de 2014 sob a categoria "ciências veterinárias", bem como os dados registrados na Web of Science entre 1994 e 2013 sobre as revistas que declararam documentos publicados em outro idioma que não o inglês. A seguir, as revistas foram classificadas por quartil, extraindo-se informações acerca de: índice de impacto, idioma(s) declarado(s), país de origem, número total de documentos publicados, número total de revisões publicadas, porcentagem de documentos publicados em inglês e quartil em

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“…One of the unexpected results of this study was that contributions from Anglophone countries have not increased even though AJVS modified the language of publication and its name at the end of 2016, turning it into a completely English-language journal. Moreover, the proportion of manuscripts authored by researchers from anglophone countries was 8.1% between 1994-2013, a time at which the proportion of English documents published by AJVS was 14.0% (Krauskopf et al 2017).…”