Scholarly publication of Brazilian researchers across disciplinary communities

Abstract

This paper examines the context of scholarly knowledge production and dissemination in Brazil by comparing the publishing practices in both Portuguese and in English of Brazilian scholars who hold a research grant, across eight fields of knowledge. Data consists of 1,874 Curricula Vitae and the analysis focused on the language, number, and genres of publications over a three-year period (2014 to 2016). The study revealed a clear contrast regarding the more frequent use of English by researchers in the ‘harder’ sciences and the preference for Portuguese by those in the ‘softer’ sciences. The results also suggested an interconnection in which scholars who published the most tended to adopt English. Multiple factors involved in the genre and language choices made by academics were analysed, such as characteristics of the work produced by each disciplinary community, the audience of the research, the type of language used, and the need to obtain research funding. This investigation can potentially inform policies and investments in Brazilian higher education and research to provide continued support specific to the needs of different disciplinary communities, as well as foster the inclusion of multilingual scholars who do not have English as their first language in the global arena of knowledge production and dissemination.

Internationalization of Higher Education and the Role of Languages: Insights from the Global North and the Global South

“…With regard to language preferences, English has attained the status of a global scientific and academic lingua franca (Baumvol et al, 2021) despite criticism to its hegemony in academic publications (Céspedes, 2021;Hamel, 2013;Finardi et al, 2022Finardi et al, , 2023 and in the Global South in general (e.g., Finardi, 2019). Hyland (2015) reports that English is used in 95% of all publications in the Science Citation Index (SCI).…”

Supervisory Feedback on Chinese Doctoral Students’ Drafts of a Research Article

“…Example 2: OV: When the test is started, the quickest and most reliable server, not necessarily the nearest, will be chosen. RV: Before the test starts, a small pre-test is conducted where several small (under 1 KB) XHR 4 files are sent to the client from different servers; the server which owns the shortest file transmission time will be chosen as the test server.…”

“…With English as the lingua franca of the research world and given the challenges of academic publication, novice writers who learn English as a foreign or second language need guidance from language teachers and academic supervisors. English for Research Publication Purposes (ERPP) can provide crucial pedagogical support for the publication success of those novice writers, and hence has been receiving increasing research attention in both the English-speaking context [2] and the non-English-speaking counterpart [3][4][5].…”