Publish in English or Perish in Portuguese: Struggles and Constraints on the Semiperiphery

Abstract

This paper examines the choice between English lingua franca and Portuguese (a pluricentric language in research article publishing), a choice which presents both a challenge and an opportunity to authors operating within the semiperipheral space of Portuguese research communities. Data on articles from three disciplinary areas: Linguistics, Information Science and Library Science, and Pharmacology and Pharmacy, written in Portuguese and English, have been retrieved from the Web of Science (WoS) covering a 20-year period (1998-2017). Figures show a rise in publications in the second decade (2008-2017) in both languages: the number of English papers is higher throughout, but the rise in the number of Portuguese papers is steeper over these latter years. Given the disparity in the number of Portuguese and English-language WoS-indexed journals, the rise in English is probably not due to individual authorial choices, but to the lack of indexed journals in Portuguese, as well as to the constraints of the publishing market. Language choice is embedded in symbolic places of knowledge construction-in the processes of voicing research claims, in the multilayered historical processes within disciplinary communities of practice, and in the marketization of research publishing. These issues may shape future ways of disseminating knowledge in a publishing arena that will continue to be globalized, though perhaps not so monolingual.

Latin American Journals and Hegemonic Languages for Academic Publishing in Scopus and Web of Science

“…This study reveals that, even within Latin American journals inserted in the mainstream publication/ consecration circuit (a priori, those of top-quality research and with a global reach, but see Beigel [2014b, p.745], and Gruber [2014, p.167]), English appears as a complement to Spanish and Portuguese, but not yet reaching the level of penetration reported in other linguistic and regional contexts (AMMON, 2012;SALÖ, 2015;SOLOVOVA et al, 2018). While marginal, as shown by the scarce percentage of Latin American journals in relation to the indexes' totals, languages other than English do have a presence in the international mainstream circuit.…”

“…This is consistent with Monteiro and Hirano's (2020) recent study, which shows that Brazilian researchers in the hard sciences prefer publishing in English in international, mainstream journals, and report fewer challenges doing so than their colleagues in the Social Sciences and Humanities. As regards Latin American journals indexed in a mainstream database such as WoS, it is precisely among these more culturally, linguistically embedded disciplines (BENNETT, 2015), where context plays a major role in the defining of scholarly traditions and language is an active constituent of knowledge, paradigms, objects of study, and methodologies (ORTIZ, 2009;SOLOVOVA et al, 2018), that Spanish and Portuguese exhibit a greater prevalence than English.…”

Open access journal publishing in the Nordic countries

“…Publishing articles on topics of local importance and/or in the local languages is, in such countries, seen as valuable mission for academics (Canadian Scholarly Publishing Working Group [CSPWG], ). Often, studies published in them would have difficulties in being accepted in international journals published by predominantly Anglo‐Saxon publishers (Solovova, Santos, & Veríssimo, ), and these channels offer alternative outlets. This is particularly important in the social sciences and humanities.…”

Systematic Review of Spatial Planning and Marine Protected Areas: A Brazilian Perspective

“…Although the growth of publications in Brazil has been evident since 2002, Brazilian publications still have little presence abroad due to the language barrier (Barata et al, 2018). Authors in research areas such as the social sciences and humanities publish mainly in Portuguese, although in some areas it is disregarded as a language of knowledge dissemination (Solovova et al, 2018). Similarly, the keywords could have directed the search to find studies on spatial management and protected areas tin the contexts studied, but not studies related to planning effectiveness.…”