Abstract
Researchers tend to publish their articles in English in order to get more citations and influence, even in the non-native English language countries. Founding S&T academic journals in English has become the choices of most publishers. In this article, we apply the method from linguistic studies which is used to measure the communication value of languages to measure the communication value of English-language journals published in non-native English countries and compare it with native-language journals. An indicator Q-value is designed to evaluate academic journals, which is comprised of three independent indicators: prevalence index, centrality index and international diffusivity index, which form a three-dimensional coordinate system and each journal is defined as a vector and the Q-value is the length of the vector. A total of 180 S&T academic journals are studied. The result shows that the Q-value can correctly reflect the communication value of English-language S&T academic journal in non-native English language countries and top native language journals can also have high communication value.
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Acknowledgements
This research was supported by National Social Science Foundation of China (Project Number: 15BTQ059) and Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (Project Number: ZD2018-18). Furthermore, we are grateful for Dr. Guilan Zhang for her help with data processing.
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Yu, Z., Ma, Z., Wang, H. et al. Communication value of English-language S&T academic journals in non-native English language countries. Scientometrics 125, 1389–1402 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03594-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03594-3