Linguistic discrimination in scientometrics
| Main Author: | Luc Boruta |
|---|---|
| Format: | Proceeding eJournal |
| Bahasa: | eng |
| Terbitan: |
, 2018
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: |
https://zenodo.org/record/4066283 |
Daftar Isi:
- There is a severe lack of linguistic diversity in the most prominent databases that are currently available to compute impact metrics and other scientometric indicators. This can be observed in traditional citation indexes like Scopus and Web of Science, but also in newer services that provide altmetrics data like Altmetric and PlumX Metrics. We identify two major reasons for this lack of linguistic diversity. The first is the privileged status of English as the current lingua franca of scholarly communications. The second is the dominant role of a very limited number of organizations in the large-scale collection and redistribution of scientometrics data. In this position paper, we argue that such selection biases in scientometrics are discriminatory and thus prejudicial to the scholarly community, and especially to contributors who publish content and engage with other stakeholders using languages other than English. We then summarize our experience building Cobaltmetrics to show that there are no serious technical obstacles to the creation and operation of massively multilingual scientometric services.