Running Like Alice and Losing Good Ideas: On the Quasi-Compulsive Use of English by Non-native English Speaking Scientists

摘要

The profuse publication of articles and books debating the use and abuse of English as a global language for science (Garfield 1962; Amonn 2001; Montgomery 2004) evi dences the timeless persistence of a complex and unsolved problem with deep multi-cultural roots. Many non-native English speaking (hereafter, non-NES) countries currently exert enormous explicit or implicit pressure on their sci entists to publish in international high-impact peer-reviewed journals, which are in English. This pressure is promoted under the premise that the impact factor of a journal is positively related to the quality of the science it publishes. This premise implies that publishing in high-impact peer-reviewed journals is the best way to demon strate the excellence of local scientists. Whether we agree with this premise or not, and independently of its legiti macy (Clavero 2010a, b; Guariguata et al. 2010), we have long accepted it as the paradigmatic scenario that rules the way we do science and publish scientific results worldwide. Indeed, "this is the way it is", as Gannon (2008) wrote in a singular editorial for the prestigious journal EMBO-Reports. In Argentina, for instance, the National Council for Scientific and Technologic Research evaluates a researcher's professional performance with a system that assigns decreasing scores to papers in the first, second, and third portions of a list of international journals with decreasing impact factors.