The citation advantage of foreign language references for Chinese social science papers

Abstract

Contemporary scientific exchanges are international, yet language continues to be a persistent barrier to scientific communication, particularly for non-native English-speaking scholars. Since the ability to absorb knowledge has a strong impact on how researchers create new scientific knowledge, a comprehensive access to and understanding of both domestic and international scientific publications is essential for scientific performance. This study explores the effect of absorbed knowledge on research impact by analyzing the relationship between the language diversity of cited references and the number of citations received by the citing paper. Chinese social sciences are taken as the research object, and the data, 950,302 papers published between 1998 and 2013 with 8,151,327 cited references, were collected from the Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index (CSSCI). Results show that there is a stark increase in the consumption of foreign language material within the Chinese social science community, and English material accounts for the vast majority of this consumption. Papers with foreign language references receive significantly more citations than those without, and the citation advantage of these internationalized work holds when we control for characteristics of the citing papers, such as the discipline, prestige of journal, prestige of institution, and scientific collaboration. However, the citation advantage has decreased from 1998 to 2008, largely as an artifact of the increased number of papers citing foreign language material. After 2008, however, the decline of the citation advantage subsided and became relatively stable, which suggests that incorporating foreign language literature continues to increase scientific impact, even as the scientific community itself becomes increasingly international. However, internationalization is not without concerns: the work closes with a discussion of the benefits and potential problems of the lack of linguistic diversity in scientific communication.

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

“…When there is no incentive to learn and to read documents written in other foreign languages than English, researchers might be motivated to ignore other foreign languages and cite only sources in their native language and in English because it increases their citations. As discussed by Gong et al (2019), Chinese language texts receive more citations when they cite foreign language documents and this foreign language is nearly always English.…”

“…The advantage for those who want to increase their citation count is to cite texts written in English. Gong et al (2019) have shown that Chinese scholars' publications that cite more English-language sources are more cited than publications that cite more sources in Chinese. However, abandoning publishing in a native language and abandoning the citation of sources in non-English languages contribute to the impoverishment of native cultures (Filippov, 2016) and a decrease in cultural diversity.…”

Analysis of the scientific literature's abstract writing style and citations

“…Wesel et al (2014) found that the number of references is significantly related to citations in disciplines like sociology, general and internal medicine and applied physics. Gong et al (2019), on the basis of CSSCI data sources in China, found that for all disciplines, the citation number of papers containing foreign references was significantly higher than that without foreign references. Stevens and Duque (2019) found that when the references were ordered alphabetically, papers rank in the front had a higher possibility of being cited.…”

“…Most of the existing researches have investigated into factors such as the title of the paper (Guo et al, 2018), its authors (Potthoff and Zimmermann, 2017) and the references (Gong et al, 2019). These types of text have been extensively researched because they are readily accessible and would not require too much computational resources to process.…”

Використання Бібліометрії В Соціальних Та Гуманітарних Науках

“…Результати опитування показують, що автори, для яких англійська мова не є рідною, часто вважають, що рецензенти та редактори журналів упереджені щодо мовленнєвих недоліків у їхніх рукописах [26]. Також, lingua franca може мати негативний ефект на розвиток національних досліджень, що присвячені певним важливим національним питанням, однак є непопулярними серед англомовних досліджень [27]. Кращі перспективи щодо фінансування дослідження, пошуку колег для співпраці, впливовості видань для публікації результатів може стимулювати науковців відмовлятися від регіональної тематики у своїй науковій роботі.…”