Multilingual publishing in the social sciences and humanities: A seven-country European study

Area of Science:

• Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) research
• European research landscape
• Scholarly communication

Background:

• English dominates scientific publishing globally.
• SSH researchers often create culturally relevant work in local languages.
• Multilingualism is a key aspect of academic practice in Europe.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the prevalence of multilingualism in SSH research.
• To analyze publication patterns across seven European countries.
• To understand the role of local languages in scholarly output.

Main Methods:

• Analysis of 164,218 peer-reviewed journal articles from 2013-2015.
• Data collected from researchers in the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Flanders, Norway, Poland, and Slovenia.
• Examination of publication language diversity among 51,063 researchers.

Main Results:

• Multilingual publishing is prevalent across diverse SSH fields and locations.
• Over one-third of researchers (publishing >=3 articles) used at least two languages.
• Flanders had the highest monolingual publishing rate (80.9%), while Slovenia (57.2%) and Poland (59.3%) had the lowest.

Conclusions:

• Multilingual publishing is an active practice in European SSH, irrespective of geography or history.
• While research is international, multilingualism sustains locally relevant scholarship.
• Multilingual publishing offers potential for broader societal and academic impact.