Abstract
Non-English journals still play important role in scholarly communication especially in social sciences, arts and humanities disciplines. Based on data from Web of Science and 2016 edition of Journal Citation Reports, we find that non-English publishing languages influence the journal impact factor (JIF) significantly. Journals with a high proportion of non-English publications suffer from low impact factor in both science and social sciences domains. The influence of non-English publications on JIF is weak for journals with a small proportion of non-English publications. We argue that it is not suitable to compare the JIFs of a non-English journal with an English journal which are calculated by using citation data from an international database such as Web of Science.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
References
Bornmann, L., Schier, H., Marx, W., & Daniel, H.-D. (2012). What factors determine citation counts of publications in chemistry besides their quality? Journal of Informetrics, 6(1), 11–18. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joi.2011.08.004.
González-Alcaide, G., Valderrama-Zurián, J. C., & Aleixandre-Benavent, R. (2012). The impact factor in non-english-speaking countries. Scientometrics, 92(2), 297–311. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-012-0692-y.
Liang, L., Rousseau, R., & Zhong, Z. (2013). Non-english journals and papers in physics and chemistry: Bias in citations? Scientometrics, 95(1), 333–350. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-012-0828-0.
Liu, W. (2017). The changing role of non-English papers in scholarly communication: Evidence from Web of Science’s three journal citation indexes. Learned Publishing, 30(2), 115–123. https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1089.
Liu, W., Hu, G., & Gu, M. (2016). The probability of publishing in first-quartile journals. Scientometrics, 106(3), 1273–1276. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-015-1821-1.
Liu, W., Hu, G., Tang, L., & Wang, Y. (2015). China’s global growth in social science research: Uncovering evidence from bibliometric analyses of SSCI publications (1978–2013). Journal of Informetrics, 9(3), 555–569. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joi.2015.05.007.
Liu, W., & Li, Y. (2017). Open access publications in sciences and social sciences: A comparative analysis. Learned Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1114.
Sangwal, K. (2013). Some citation-related characteristics of scientific journals published in individual countries. Scientometrics, 97(3), 719–741. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-013-1053-1.
Tahamtan, I., Safipour Afshar, A., & Ahamdzadeh, K. (2016). Factors affecting number of citations: A comprehensive review of the literature. Scientometrics, 107(3), 1195–1225. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-016-1889-2.
Tang, L., Shapira, P., & Youtie, J. (2015). Is there a clubbing effect underlying Chinese research citation increases? Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 66(9), 1923–1932. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.23302.
van Raan, A. F. J., van Leeuwen, T. N., & Visser, M. S. (2011). Severe language effect in university rankings: Particularly Germany and France are wronged in citation-based rankings. Scientometrics, 88(2), 495–498. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-011-0382-1.
Acknowledgements
This research was funded by Zhejiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China (#LQ18G030010 and #LQ18G010005) and National Natural Science Foundation of China (#71303147). The views expressed herein are those of the authors. This study has benefited greatly from the insightful comments from anonymous reviewer. We are responsible for any errors.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Liu, F., Hu, G., Tang, L. et al. The penalty of containing more non-English articles. Scientometrics 114, 359–366 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-017-2577-6
Received:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-017-2577-6