Growth of non‐English‐language literature on biodiversity conservation

Abstract

English is widely recognized as the language of science, and English‐language publications (ELPs) are rapidly increasing. It is often assumed that the number of non‐ELPs is decreasing. This assumption contributes to the underuse of non‐ELPs in conservation science, practice, and policy, especially at the international level. However, the number of conservation articles published in different languages is poorly documented. Using local and international search systems, we searched for scientific articles on biodiversity conservation published from 1980 to 2018 in English and 15 non‐English languages. We compared the growth rate in publications across languages. In 12 of the 15 non‐English languages, published conservation articles significantly increased every year over the past 39 years, at a rate similar to English‐language articles. The other three languages showed contrasting results, depending on the search system. Since the 1990s, conservation science articles in most languages increased exponentially. The variation in the number of non‐English‐language articles identified among the search systems differed markedly (e.g., for simplified Chinese, 11,148 articles returned with local search system and 803 with Scopus). Google Scholar and local literature search systems returned the most articles for 11 and 4 non‐English languages, respectively. However, the proportion of peer‐reviewed conservation articles published in non‐English languages was highest in Scopus, followed by Web of Science and local search systems, and lowest in Google Scholar. About 20% of the sampled non‐English‐language articles provided no title or abstract in English; thus, in theory, they were undiscoverable with English keywords. Possible reasons for this include language barriers and the need to disseminate research in countries where English is not widely spoken. Given the known biases in statistical methods and study characteristics between English‐ and non‐English‐language studies, non‐English‐language articles will continue to play an important role in improving the understanding of biodiversity and its conservation.

How much biodiversity is concealed in the word “biodiversity”?

“…For example, a recent review of twelve major biodiversity databases suggested that variability in taxonomic and geographic scopes and potential incompatibility of metadata are major barriers to data integration (45). Second, many biases are intrinsic to biodiversity databases (17,38,50), suggesting that some of the data we need still await to be collected from the field (51), existing collections (52), or even "grey" literature (53,54), all requiring gigantic human effort. Ultimately, it seems we are being flooded by repeated data on the same taxa [e.g., in 2020, vertebrates accounted for 68% of GBIF-available data; (17)], increasing biases in inadvertent ways (2).…”

10. How Conservation Practice Can Generate Evidence

“…Further, the number of non-English-language conservation articles published annually has been increasing over the past 39 years, at a rate similar to English-language articles (Chowdhury et al, 2022).…”

“…When developing search strategies (Stage 1), identifying appropriate sources of non-Englishlanguage evidence (e.g. bibliographic databases) is key, as few international sources index non-English-language evidence (Chowdhury et al, 2022). For example, non-English-language literature is searchable on Google Scholar (https://scholar.google.com) using non-Englishlanguage keywords.…”

“…The translatE project provides useful tools and databases that aid multilingual evidence searches. This includes a list of 466 peer-reviewed journals in ecology and conservation in 19 languages (translatE Project, 2020), a list of language-specific literature search systems for 13 languages (available in Table 1 in Chowdhury et al, 2022), a list of 1,234 non-English-language studies testing the effectiveness of conservation actions (available as S2 Data in Amano et al, 2021a), and more general tips for overcoming language barriers in science (Amano et al, 2021b) including resources and opportunities for non-native-English speakers (Amano, 2022). 2.5 Sources of Evidence…”

Trends and progress in studying butterfly migration

“…Information on butter y migration is often published in non-peer-reviewed journals [i.e, grey literature] [11], and up to one third of scienti c documents related to biodiversity conservation are published in languages other than English [27]. Ignoring the non-English-language and grey literature can severely bias our understanding [28][29][30][31][32][33][34]. Here we compile a global knowledge base on butter y migration from multiple sources, including peer-reviewed papers and grey literature [including web articles] that are available in English or ve other languages.…”