Thinking in a foreign tongue: The problem of English language dominance in social research

摘要

Drugs and alcohol are consumed by people from different countries and language groups around the world. Yet, this diversity fails to be reflected in the research that aims to expound the pleasures, problems, and consequences of this consumption. A recent study documents the degree to which the Anglophone world dominates the addiction publishing field (Hellman et al., 2020). The English-speaking world of four countries – the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia – represented 75% of the editorial workforce and 70% of all authors that published in the 41 journals. Representation of low-income countries was close to zero; there was a negligible number of author and editor affiliations in middleincome countries, and the editors-in-chief were mostly male (80%). All journals nevertheless claimed to advance research of universal value, applicability, and closeness to contexts of usage. The question becomes: are we achieving a closeness to the diverse realities around the world when our modus operandi entails a homogeneous isomorphic wheel, where almost everybody comes from the same background and views matters through similar cognitive and cultural setups?.