Speaking of science Scientific Babel How Science Was Done Before and After Global English Michael D. Gordin University of Chicago Press, 2015. 421 pp.

Abstract

How English became the language of science.

The changing role of non-English papers in scholarly communication: Evidence from Web of Science's three journal citation indexes

“…Similarly, English as the dominating language in scholarly communication has also been widely stated in previous studies (Bartholomaus, Goldbeck‐Wood, Sewering, & Baethge, ; Enrique Hamel, ; Lin & Zhang, ; Meneghini & Packer, ; Nyhart, ; Tardy, ). For example, about 95% items in Science Citation Index in 1995 were published in English (Leeuwen, Moed, Tijssen, Visser, & Raan, ).…”

“…However, some other languages such as German and French were also acting as important languages of sciences and social sciences during the first half of the 20th century, 1970s, and 1980s. The shrinking of German and French papers may be due to economical, geopolitical, and scientific reasons (Nyhart, 2015;Tardy, 2004), further facilitating English as the lingua franca of scholarly communication (Meneghini & Packer, 2007 ing that English as a scholarly communication language is more dominating in natural sciences than social sciences, in theoretical disciplines than applied disciplines, and in natural and social sciences than arts and humanities echoes the findings of previous studies (Flowerdew & Li, 2009;Tardy, 2004 van Leeuwen, and Visser (2011). The relatively high H index of Chinese papers found in the SCIE citation index echoes the findings of .…”

“…However, some other languages such as German and French were also acting as important languages of sciences and social sciences during the first half of the 20th century, 1970s, and 1980s. The shrinking of German and French papers may be due to economical, geopolitical, and scientific reasons (Nyhart, ; Tardy, ), further facilitating English as the lingua franca of scholarly communication (Meneghini & Packer, ). Different from natural science and social science disciplines, non‐English papers have consistently played an important role in arts and humanities disciplines from the beginning of 1975.…”

“…Figure 1 illustrates the evolution of non-English papers during the whole study period. tion Index Expanded (1900-2015. Note: Four periods: 1900-1944, 1945-1968, 1969-1977, and 1978-2015.…”

Levelling the lingo playing field

“…This aside, Jacobs's support of a single language for international scientific communication makes sense. That English is the language our community has settled on is a product of history; had one been writing a 100 years ago, one might have predicted German would dominate . Nevertheless, the use of English is now accepted and supported as standard by most researchers.…”