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ethically, surely, it is right that research should be accessible by the (often NESB) researched community?
 
to be included in Cochrane/campbell, you are NOT allowed to exclude non-english papers!
 
Most have an English abstract anyway - but most 'so-called' SRs exclude non - Medline etc journals - i.e. there is a strong publication bias in favour of certain commercial networks....
 
Mark R D Johnson
Director, MSRC/CEEHD
De Montfort University
Hawthorn Building 00.20, The Gateway
Leicester LE1 9BH
 
Please don't phone - use e-mail!

From: UK medical/ health care library community / information workers on behalf of Burnham Tom
Sent: Tue 02/10/2012 11:11
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Non-English language publications?

There was an interesting paper in Swiss Medical Weekly recently by a couple of Danish medical journal editors.  They give an analysis of impact factors (per the Thomson Reuters list) for general/internal medical journals over the last 10 years and show that IFs of English language journals are significantly higher (medians of 1.45 and 0.29 for 2010) and although Ifs of both classes had tended to increase over the period, those of English language journals had increased (non-significantly) faster.  One reason they quote for this is that non-English language journals are under-represented in bibliographic indexing databases.

They advocate that “non-English-language journals desirous of contributing to the international pool of knowledge should consider changing publication language, adopting either a bi- or a monolingual approach. Publishing in English (possibly in addition to the national language) will increase journal visibility, expand readership and thus increase the potential number of citations.

“The potential increase in IFs (or potential inclusion in the JCR) might have been a contributing factor for national journals that have already changed publication language into English.  However, increasing IFs should not be the sole argument for changing publication language. From an ethical perspective, it could be argued that original research findings should not be published in small, local/national languages and thus “hidden” from the international scientific community. Instead, authors and editors should seek to communicate original research findings to as many readers as possible.”

See: Impact factor trends for general medical journals: non-English-language journals are lagging behind
Siri Vinther, Jacob Rosenberg
Swiss Medical Weekly 25 Sep 2012;142:w13572
http://www.smw.ch/content/smw-2012-13572/

What does anyone think?  Certainly there are quite a lot of “systematic” reviews that are restricted to English-language papers.  Should we be worried at this or is the med-sci community now uniformly monoglot?

Regards

Tom Burnham

Project Manager/Information Specialist

Pharmacy, Ground Floor, Southwark Wing

Guy's Hospital

London  SE1 9RT

020 7188 5026

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