Abstract
We contend that the exclusive focus on the English language in scientific research might hinder effective communication between scientists and practitioners or policy makers whose mother tongue is non-English. This barrier in scientific knowledge and data transfer likely leads to significant knowledge gaps and may create biases when providing global patterns in many fields of science. To demonstrate this, we compiled data on the global economic costs of invasive alien species reported in 15 non-English languages. We compared it with equivalent data from English documents (i.e., the InvaCost database, the most up-to-date repository of invasion costs globally). The comparison of both databases (~7500 entries in total) revealed that non-English sources: (i) capture a greater amount of data than English sources alone (2500 vs. 2396 cost entries respectively); (ii) add 249 invasive species and 15 countries to those reported by English literature, and (iii) increase the global cost estimate of invasions by 16.6% (i.e., US$ 214 billion added to 1.288 trillion estimated from the English database). Additionally, 2712 cost entries — not directly comparable to the English database — were directly obtained from practitioners, revealing the value of communication between scientists and practitioners. Moreover, we demonstrated how gaps caused by overlooking non-English data resulted in significant biases in the distribution of costs across space, taxonomic groups, types of cost, and impacted sectors. Specifically, costs from Europe, at the local scale, and particularly pertaining to management, were largely under-represented in the English database. Thus, combining scientific data from English and non-English sources proves fundamental and enhances data completeness. Considering non-English sources helps alleviate biases in understanding invasion costs at a global scale. Finally, it also holds strong potential for improving management performance, coordination among experts (scientists and practitioners), and collaborative actions across countries. Note: non-English versions of the abstract and figures are provided in Appendix S5 in 12 languages.
Highlights
English is the language that dominates scientific publications in peer-reviewed journals in all research fields (O'Neil, 2018)
We focused mainly on the most widely spoken languages, or the ones where we assumed that reports of economic costs of biological invasions could be found, such as Bengali, Chinese, French, or Spanish
The amount of retrieved data was dependent on multiple factors such as country or language specificities; for example, some countries have policies to make data publicly available, or have specific budgets for invasive species, while others do not
Summary
English is the language that dominates scientific publications in peer-reviewed journals in all research fields (O'Neil, 2018). Non-English literature remains largely underutilized by most researchers due to the language barrier that impedes understanding of the published materials, in addition to the lower accessibility to these sources (Ito and Wiesel, 2006; Lazarev and Nazarovets, 2018; Tao et al, 2018). Researchers that are non-native English speakers might prefer to publish part of their work in their native language or in local journals (Verde Arregoitia and González-Suárez, 2019; but see Nuñez and Pauchard, 2010). While this maximizes local or national impact, it restricts the scope of their results to the scientific community and popular press globally, and thereby decreases opportunities for sharing experiences, novel ideas, observations or methodological advances (Nuñez et al, 2019). The value of accounting for data and results beyond just those made available in English has been recently recognized for global meta-analyses (Konno et al, 2020)
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