Researchers whose first language is not English can spend around twice as long reading an English-language scientific journal article as native speakers. For a PhD student working on their thesis, that can mean spending up to 19 additional working days per year just reading papers.
These statistics, published today in PLoS Biology1, might not be shocking, researchers say, but it’s important to measure the effects of language barriers on the careers of academics who are not fluent in English. It “is the first step for the scientific community to make more effort to tackle this problem”, says Tatsuya Amano, a biodiversity researcher at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, and a co-author of the study.
Amano and his colleagues polled 908 environmental scientists from 8 countries, each of whom had authored at least one peer-reviewed paper in English. Some of the participants were from countries where a moderate proportion of people are proficient in English (Bolivia, Spain and Ukraine), whereas others were from countries where proficiency in English is uncommon (Bangladesh, Japan and Nepal). Their answers were compared with those from people in countries where English is the official language (Nigeria and the United Kingdom).