---
title: "Languages of science"
chunk: 6/13
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_science"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:39:42.114015+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

=== English standardization ===
Nearly all the scientific publications indexed on the leading commercial academic search engines are in English. As of 2022, this observation covers 95.86% of the 28,142,849 references indexed on the Web of Science platform, in addition to 84.35% of the 20,600,733 references indexed in the Scopus system.
The minimal coverage of non-English languages creates a feedback loop—non-English publications can be considered less valuable because they are not indexed in international rankings and fare poorly in evaluation metrics. As many as 75,000 articles, book titles, and book reviews from Germany were excluded from Biological Abstracts between 1970 and 1996. In 2009, at least 6555 journals were published in Spanish and Portuguese on a global scale, and "only a small fraction are included in the Scopus and Web of Science indices."
Criteria for inclusion in commercial databases not only favor English journals but also incentivize non-English journals to discontinue their local journals. They "demand that articles be in English, have abstracts in English, or at least have their references in English". In 2012, the Web of Science was explicitly committed to the anglicization (and Romanization) of published knowledge:

English is the universal language of science. For this reason, Thomson Reuters focuses on journals that publish full text in English, or at very least, bibliographic information in English. There are many journals covered in Web of Science that publish articles with bibliographic information in English and full text in another language. However, going forward, it is clear that the journals most important to the international research community will publish full text in English. This is especially true in the natural sciences. There are notable exceptions to this rule in the Arts & Humanities and in Social Sciences topics.
This commitment to English science has a significant performative effect. The influence that commercial databases "now wield on the international stage is considerable and works very much in favor of English", since they provide a wide range of indicators of research quality. They contributed to "large-scale inequality, notably between Northern and Southern countries". While leading scientific publishers had initially "failed to grasp the significance of electronic publishing," they successfully pivoted to a "data analytics business" by the 2010s. Actors such as Elsevier and Springer are increasingly able to control "all aspects of the research lifecycle, from submission to publication and beyond". Due to this vertical integration, commercial metrics are no longer restricted to journal article metadata, but they can include a wide range of individual and social data extracted from scientific communities.
National databases of scientific publications show that the use of English continued to expand during the 2000s and 2010s at the expense of local languages. According to a comparison of seven national databases in Europe from 2011 to 2014, in "all countries, there was a growth in the proportion of English publications". In France, data from the Open Science Barometer shows that the share of publications in French has shrunk from 23% in 2013 to 12-16% by 2019–2020.
According to Ulrich Ammon, the predominance of English has created a hierarchy and a "central-peripheral dimension" within the global scientific publication landscape, which negatively affects the reception of research published in a non-English language. The unique use of English has discriminatory effects on scholars who are not sufficiently conversant in the language; in a survey organized in Germany in 1991, 30% of researchers in all disciplines gave up on publishing when English was the only option. In this context, the emergence of new scientific powers is no longer linked with the appearance of a new language of science, which was the case until the 1960s. China has quickly become a major player in international research, placing second after the United States in numerous rankings and disciplines. Nevertheless, most of this research is English-speaking and abides by the linguistic norms established by commercial indexes.
The dominant position of English has also been strengthened by the "lexical deficit" accumulated during past decades by alternative languages of sciences; after the 1960s, "new terms were being coined in English at a much faster rate than they were being created in French."