A smack of all neighbouring languages: How multilingual is scholarly communication?

Understand

Language is a major source of systemic inequities in science, particularly among scholars whose first language is not English.

• Studies have examined scientists' linguistic practices in specific contexts; few, however, have provided a global analysis of multilingualism in science.
• Using two major bibliometric databases (OpenAlex and Dimensions), we provide a large-scale analysis of linguistic diversity in science, considering both the language of publications (N=87,577,942) and of cited references (N=1,480,570,087).
• For the 1990-2023 period, we find that only Indonesian, Portuguese and Spanish have expanded at a faster pace than English.