The Impact of Anglicizing Former German-Language Psychology Journals on Authorship and Citation Frequencies

Abstract

Exemplary for other than English-language psychology journals, the impact of recent Anglicization of five former German-language psychology journals on (1) authorship (nationality, i.e., native language, and number of authors, i.e., single or multiple authorships), (2) formal characteristics of the journal (number of articles per volume and length of articles), and (3) number of citations of the articles in other journal articles, the language of the citing publications, and the impact factors (IF) is analyzed. Scientometric data on these variables are gathered for all articles published in the four years before anglicizing and in the four years after anglicizing the same journal. Results reveal rather quick changes: Citations per year since original articles’ publication increase significantly, and the IF of the journals go up markedly. Frequencies of citing in German-language journals decrease, citing in English-language journals increase significantly after the Anglicization of former German-language psychology journals, and there is a general trend of increasing citations in other languages as well. Side effects of anglicizing former German-language psychology journals include the publication of shorter papers, their availability to a more international authorship, and a slight, but significant increase in multiple authorships.

Forecasting trends of development of psychology from a bibliometric perspective

“…These trends develop in parallel with positive forecasted bibliometric trends for the English-language publications of German-speaking authors. This confirms recent developments in anglicizing psychology publications in the Germanspeaking research community (see, e.g., Krampen et al 2005Krampen et al , 2011. In addition, it supports the more general bibliometric results that ''international cooperation in psychology is on the rise'' (Kliegl and Bates 2010, p. 1).…”

Psychologists’ research activities and professional information-seeking behaviour: Empirical analyses with reference to the theory of the Intellectual and Social Organization of the Sciences

“…In connection with the recent debate on the (re-)internationalization and anglicization of psychological research in the German-speaking countries (see, e.g. [24,25]), it should be noted that more than one third of the scientific output refers to English-language publications and more than three quarters of the citations by others are citations in English-language articles (see Table 1).…”

Trends of internationalization and collaboration in U.S. psychology journals 1950–2010.

“…With English being widely taught worldwide as the primary second language (9 out of 10 children in primary school study English as a second language), it has quickly become the unofficial academic and scientific lingua franca (European Commission, 2013). Krampen, Huckert, and Schui (2012) examined the impact of the Anglicization of former German-language psychology journals on issues of authorship and number of article citations in other journals from 1973 to 2010. As the former German-language psychology journals became Anglicized, the number of authors increased.…”