Abstract
Articles published in English language journals with citations of non-English peer reviewed materials are not very common today. However, as epidemiologists are becoming more aware of data and information being readily available and accessible in the non-English literature, the question of whether non-English materials can be cited in English language journals and if so, how should they be cited, has become an increasingly important issue. Bringing together personal insights from the author's familiarity with both the English and Chinese language epidemiological literature and results from a survey on the use of citations of non-English peer reviewed materials across a sample of epidemiology and public health journals, this commentary discusses the different ways authors cite non-English articles in different English language journals and the different methods used by journals to handle non-Latin scripts (e.g. transliteration). This commentary will be useful to both epidemiologists and editors alike.
Highlights
English has long been the lingua franca of the scientific world [1]
As demonstrated by the various articles in this thematic series of the Emerging Themes in Epidemiology, there are a substantial number of epidemiology and public health journals published in languages other than English today
One possible reason for this is that articles in these journals are hardly cited, perhaps because of their perceived low quality and/or limited readership, which contribute to a low impact factor, which further discourages authors to submit high-quality research articles to these journals
Summary
English has long been the lingua franca of the scientific world [1]. as demonstrated by the various articles in this thematic series of the Emerging Themes in Epidemiology, there are a substantial number of epidemiology and public health journals published in languages other than English today. The annual Journal Citation Reports published by Thomson Scientific include a journal impact factor, which is "a ratio between citations and recent citable items published" [2] It is calculated by dividing the number of cites received in a given year to articles published in the preceding two years by the number of articles published in those two years (citable items). The journal impact factor was never meant to be the sole basis for 'quality' ranking of journals or research outputs and its merits and weaknesses are open to continual discussion [3,4]. It has become a significant part of research (page number not for citation purposes)
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