Increasing the Discoverability of Non-English Language Research Papers: A Reverse-Engineering Application of the Pitching Research Template

Abstract

Discoverability or visibility is a challenge that faces all researchers worldwide – with an ever increasing supply of good research entering the scholarly marketplace; this challenge is only becoming intensified as time passes. The global language of scholarly research is English and so the obstacle of getting noticed is magnified manyfold when the article is not written in the English language. Indeed, despite rapid advances in technology, the “tyranny of language” creates a segmentation inhibiting scholarly research and innovation generally. Mass translation of non-English language articles is neither feasible nor desirable. Our paper proposes a strategy for remedying this segmentation – such that, the work of non-English language scholars become more discoverable. The core piece of this strategy is a “reverse-engineering” [RE] application of Faff’s (2015, 2017) “pitching research” template. More specifically, we provide translated versions of the “cued” template across TWENTY ONE different languages: (1) Arabic; (2) Chinese; (3) Dutch; (4) French; (5) Greek; (6) Hindi; (7) Indonesian; (8) Japanese; (9) Korean; (10) Lao; (11) Norwegian; (12) Polish; (13) Portuguese; (14) Romanian; (15) Russian; (16) Sinhalese; (17) Spanish; (18) Tamil; (19) Thai; (20) Urdu; (21) Vietnamese (with plans to expand even further in future versions of this paper). Further, we showcase illustrative dual language examples of the RE strategy for the Chinese, Japanese and Vietnamese cases.