English Writing for International Publication in the Age of Globalization: Practices and Perceptions of Mainland Chinese Academics in the Humanities and Social Sciences

Abstract

Much scholarly attention has been given to the English writing and publishing practices of the academics in non-Anglophone countries, but studies on such practices in the humanities and social sciences (HSS) have in general been limited. The case of Mainland Chinese HSS academics is potentially interesting. On the one hand, international publications in these disciplines have been on the increase, which are also encouraged by the national research policy of "going-out". On the other hand, unlike those in science and technology (S&T), such practices in the HSS are still much less institutionalized at the local level. In the study reported in this article, semi-structured interviews were conducted with nine academics in economics, sociology and archaeology from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), and all nine participants had prior experience in international publishing. With a focus on participants' experiences and perceptions, findings from this study demonstrated the relatively passive role participants played in their international publications, the importance of various resources in bringing forth these publications, and the relations between participants' alignments with the local or international community and their voluntary investment in participating in their practices. Implications of the study were also discussed.

Obstacles to Scholarly Publishing in the Social Sciences and Humanities: A Case Study of Vietnamese Scholars

“…As a consequence of such challenges, researchers tend to resort to local publication rather than international publication. This finding is in line with those in Flowerdew [40], Ge [24], Li & Flowerdew [41], Salager-Meyer [42], who found that scholars tend to resort to writing in their native language.…”

Writing for Scholarly Publication in English for Taiwanese Researchers in the Field of English Teaching

“…There were other studies conducted in different countries showing an increasing need of international publishing, but still they were also mainly in hard sciences (Aitchison et al, 2012;Cho, 2004;Li, 2006aLi, , 2006bLi, , 2007Li, , 2016aLi, , 2016bLuo, 2015;Martín et al, 2014;Pérez-Llantada et al, 2011), except comparatively few studies in soft sciences (Bardi, 2015;Ge, 2015;Gea-Valor et al, 2014;Li, 2014;Li & Hu, 2017;Muresan & Pérez-Llantada, 2014) or in both hard and soft sciences (Buckingham, 2014;Curry & Lillis, 2014). Nonetheless, it should be noted that the research area falling within either hard sciences or soft sciences may vary a lot.…”

Unpacking the Lore on Multilingual Scholars Publishing in English: A Discussion Paper

“…Closely paralleling the development of these pressures to publish, a growing number of researchers have sought to explore and analyze a range of topics related to how established scholars and, more recently, (post)graduate students engage with these pressures (see, e.g., recent books edited by Cargill and Burgess [3], Curry and Lillis [7]; Corcoran, Englander, and Muresan [8]; and Habibie and Hyland [9]); for overviews and discussions of earlier research, see Ammon [10] and Lillis and Curry [11]. Studies have investigated multilingual writers' experiences with, and perceptions of, English-medium publishing within disciplines including applied linguistics [12,13]; humanities [14,15]; 1 Known formerly as the Web of Knowledge (Thompson Reuters); even earlier, it was the Institute for Scientific Information. 2 We use this term to refer to scholars who work in contexts where the local language/language of daily communication is not English, recognizing that multilingualism characterizes most regions of the world.…”