On Raising the International Dissemination of German Research

Abstract

It has been proposed that German basic psychology journals should change publication language to English in order to facilitate access to research from German-speaking countries. However, to truly increase the dissemination of German research, it seems crucial to progress towards an internationalization of authors and readers. We applied bibliometric analysis to investigate the impact of the transition to English on the rate of foreign authors publishing in Zeitschrift für Experimentelle Psychologie/Experimental Psychology, as well as possible associated changes in citation patterns. There was an increase in the rate of articles published by foreign authors from 14.6 and 8.7 per cent, respectively, for the last biannual periods as German-language journal, to 52.7 per cent in the first biannual period as English-language journal. Regarding citations patterns, the clearest changes emerged for domestic authors. The results illustrate possible consequences of a transition to English as publication language, and reveal that Experimental Psychology has successfully established certain prerequisites for an increase of the international dissemination of German psychology research.

Characteristics of scholarly journals published in non‐English‐speaking countries: An analysis of Library and Information Science SCOPUS journals

“…While researchers want to publish in international journals in English and promote their international influence (He & Spink, 2002; Sin, 2005), they also want to pursue regional research influence by disseminating regional research results to local readers who prefer their native languages (Li, 2014; Salager‐Meyer, 2014). Therefore, although switching to an English‐language journal has been discussed as a way of increasing journal impact internationally (Dinkel et al, 2004; Kirchik et al, 2012), it also has unfavourable consequences for local researchers, readers and research communities. To overcome language barriers, Steigerwald et al (2022) and Amano, Rios Rojas, et al (2021) suggested utilizing machine translation, which has become relatively reliable these days.…”

“…Although having a common language can facilitate international scholarly communication (Montgomery, 2013), this has led to the assumption that significant scholarly communication takes place in English—an assumption that also applies to publications in English‐language international journals. As a result, international journals currently focus on research in the English‐speaking Western world, and non‐English‐language regional journals are perceived as qualitatively inferior to English‐language international journals (Dinkel et al, 2004; Kirchik et al, 2012). However, it has been widely acknowledged that regional journals from non‐English‐speaking countries (NESC) make unique and valuable contributions to global scholarly knowledge (Amano, Berdejo‐Espinola, et al, 2021; Amano, Rios Rojas, et al, 2021; Angulo et al, 2021; Khelifa et al, 2021; Márquez & Porras, 2020; Salager‐Meyer, 2014; Steigerwald et al, 2022).…”

Temporal Trends in the Impact Factor of European versus USA Biomedical Journals

“…One of these, is the language of publication of the journals; the dominance of English in biomedical publications has well been consolidated [11]. It is possible, therefore, that editorial committees of European journals published in local languages have been tempted over the last years to change the language of publication into English, so as to increase the penetration of the journals in the global scientific community [12]. The latter could have led into a rise of their impact factor.…”

Linguistic Diversity Index: A Scientometric Measure to Enhance the Relevance of Small and Minority Group Languages

“…Scientists want to increase their number of citations (Furnham, 2020), and this forces them to publish in English and not in their native language (López-Navarro et al, 2015). Journals have a similar motivation (Chavarro et al, 2018), so they follow the same pattern, abandoning local languages and publishing in English (Dinkel et al, 2004). For an increased citation rate, it is also beneficial to get co-authors from developed countries (Meneghini et al, 2008) and publish in journals in these countries (Strehl et al, 2016).…”