Abstract
The widely held assumption that any important scientific information would be available in English underlies the underuse of non-English-language science across disciplines. However, non-English-language science is expected to bring unique and valuable scientific information, especially in disciplines where the evidence is patchy, and for emergent issues where synthesising available evidence is an urgent challenge. Yet such contribution of non-English-language science to scientific communities and the application of science is rarely quantified. Here, we show that non-English-language studies provide crucial evidence for informing global biodiversity conservation. By screening 419,679 peer-reviewed papers in 16 languages, we identified 1,234 non-English-language studies providing evidence on the effectiveness of biodiversity conservation interventions, compared to 4,412 English-language studies identified with the same criteria. Relevant non-English-language studies are being published at an increasing rate in 6 out of the 12 languages where there were a sufficient number of relevant studies. Incorporating non-English-language studies can expand the geographical coverage (i.e., the number of 2° × 2° grid cells with relevant studies) of English-language evidence by 12% to 25%, especially in biodiverse regions, and taxonomic coverage (i.e., the number of species covered by the relevant studies) by 5% to 32%, although they do tend to be based on less robust study designs. Our results show that synthesising non-English-language studies is key to overcoming the widespread lack of local, context-dependent evidence and facilitating evidence-based conservation globally. We urge wider disciplines to rigorously reassess the untapped potential of non-English-language science in informing decisions to address other global challenges. Please see the Supporting information files for Alternative Language Abstracts.
Highlights
History demonstrates that important scientific information is published not just in English and in other languages
Our analyses demonstrate that 3 out of the 4 common perceptions on the role of non-Englishlanguage scientific knowledge are not supported by evidence
Instead, (i) a considerable amount of scientific evidence underpinning effective conservation is available in non-English languages; (ii) the number of published studies providing such evidence has been increasing in many languages; and (iii) non-Englishlanguage studies can provide evidence that is relevant to species and locations for which little or no English-language evidence is available
Summary
History demonstrates that important scientific information is published not just in English and in other languages. We adopted the discipline-wide literature search method [17] to screen 419,679 peerreviewed papers in 326 journals, published in 16 languages (S1 Data), to identify non-Englishlanguage studies testing the effectiveness of interventions in biodiversity conservation (see Materials and methods). Combining this dataset with English-language studies identified with the same criteria, stored in the Conservation Evidence database [17], enabled us to assess the contribution of non-English-language studies to evidence synthesis through the testing of the following common perceptions that have rarely been corroborated to date: (i) the amount of relevant scientific evidence that is available only in non-English languages is negligible [18];. (ii) the number of relevant studies being published in non-English languages has been decreasing over time [19]; (iii) the quality of non-English-language studies (measured using the study designs adopted; see Materials and methods for more detail) is lower than that of English-language studies [7]; and (iv) evidence published in English represents a random subset of evidence published across all languages [12]
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