Shakespeare and the English Poets: The Influence of Native Speaking English Reviewers on the Acceptance of Journal Articles

Does the rise of open access journals change the way researchers collaborate? Specifically, since publishing in open access journals requires a publication fee, does income affect how researchers form international collaborations? To answer this question, we create a new data set by scraping bibliographic data from Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI) journals. Using the four income group classifications from the World Bank Analytical Classifications, we find that researchers from low-income nations are more likely to form international collaborations than researchers from wealthier nations. This result is verified to be significant using a series of pairwise Kolmogorov–Smirnov tests. We then study which nations most frequently form international collaborations with other nations and find that the USA, China, Germany, and France are the most preferred nations for forming international collaborations. While most nations prefer to form international collaborations with high-income nations, some exceptions exist, where a nation most often forms international collaborations with a nearby nation that is either an upper-middle-income or lower-middle-income nation. We further this analysis by showing that these results are apparent across the six different research categories established in the Frascati Manual. Finally, trends in publications in MDPI journals mirror trends seen in all journals, such as the continued increase in the percentage of published papers involving international collaboration.

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

International Collaboration in Open Access Publications: How Income Shapes International Collaboration

Cary

Rockwell

2020

“…Unfortunately, the pressure to publish not only heightens stress levels but it also has other negative effects, such as marginalizing teaching, or promoting research that may lack relevance, creativity, or innovation [20]. Publishing in English-considered a norm nowadays-was found to be particularly challenging for non-native speakers [21].…”

Section: Work-related Stressmentioning

confidence: 99%

Does Academic Publishing Lead to Work-Related Stress or Happiness?

Kubátová

2019

The topic of work-related stress and happiness has recently been of interest to science as well as in practice. Work-related stress has negative effects on workers, organizations, and the whole of society, whereas happiness has positive effects. It is therefore important to monitor the wellbeing of workers. This article deals with stress and happiness as related to academic publishing. To answer the research question of whether academic publishing leads to stress or happiness, a narrative analysis was conducted. Narratives from ten Czech academics were collected and analyzed with the use of a categorical-content approach. The categories used are the general causes of work-related stress and happiness as identified in the literature: work overload, ambiguity, conflict, the sense of meaningful work, job satisfaction, and affective organizational commitment. It was found that academic publishing leads to both work-related stress and happiness. However, stress is more prevalent. Not only do academics experience all the general causes of work-related stress, unfortunately they often lack the sources of happiness. Many specific causes of stress and happiness, as well as unhappiness, were discovered in the narratives. Several ways to improve the situation have been suggested. Refining policies in human resources is particularly important if universities wish to retain their academics.

“…Cameron has coined the term "verbal hygiene" to denote the irresistible urge to legislate language matters with style guides, etc., especially among publishing houses [17]. From her interviews with eight article reviewers, Strauss concludes that "it appears that there is a bias against language that differs from native speaker use, and that authors who employ nonstandard English might well be regarded negatively, regardless of the merits of their research" [18] (p. 1).…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Perceived Challenges to Anglophone Publication at Three Universities in Chile

Broekhoff

2019

It is well documented that non-Anglophone scholars face enormous pressures to publish in peer-reviewed English-medium journals both for their own advancement and for institutional prestige. Yet many of them receive little support and face big challenges. Scholars’ perceptions of these challenges often differ from those of applied linguists. This study analyzes publication challenges at three universities in Chile. Research questions included the following: How much pressure to publish do Chilean scholars feel? What do they perceive as their biggest challenges? Do these differ from perceptions of applied linguists? Data come from surveys involving 191 respondents conducted shortly after the author was an English Language Specialist for the U.S. Department of State in 2015. Surveys were administered both as personal interviews and online through SurveyMonkey. Identified challenges include language issues, workload, feedback and networking, and rhetorical structure. Suggestions are given for mitigating these challenges and for further research on these issues.