The International State of English in Scientific Writing

Abstract

The International State of English in Scientific Writing Craig Hamilton (bio) This may seem like the golden age of scientific writing, with more than 26,000 journals now active and more than 50 million articles in print (Jihna 261). But as quantity increases, so, too, do concerns over quality. Nature recently reported that more than 120 published articles were being retracted after Cyril Labbé, a French computer scientist, discovered the papers were generated by phony paper program created at MIT in 2005 (Van Noorden, “Withdraw”). Peer-review thus seems fragile. As The Economist recently reported, “When a prominent medical journal ran research past other experts in the field, it found that most of the reviewers failed to spot mistakes it had deliberately inserted into papers, even after being told they were being tested” (“Problems”). And yet, as a recent UC Berkeley study confirmed, “the peer-reviewed journal article is [and remains] the primary mode of scholarly dissemination in the sciences” (Harley et al. i). That may be why the science-publishing industry generated $9.4 billion in revenue in 2011, according to a recent estimate in Nature (Van Noorden, “Open” 427). Open-access publishing aims to alleviate the cost problem, but as a recent investigation by Science revealed, it can create other problems too. Pretending to be a biologist in Africa and using a false name, Science writer John Bohannon submitted 304 bogus papers for publication in 2013. While 98 of them got rejected, 157 of them were accepted, usually on condition that the “scientist” pay to publish the paper (Bohannon). While this is common for open-access journals, where authors (not readers) cover publication costs, it raises doubts about peer-review and quality of research in general. Scientific publishing today clearly faces issues of cost, quantity, and quality. As a teacher of scientific writing, I find the quality question most interesting here, especially the quality of English found in some published articles. I do not mean to mock scientists—when the journal Philosophy and Literature ran its Bad Writing Contests in the 1990s, we saw there was no shortage of poor writing in the humanities. My aim, rather, is to discuss inadequate English in science articles, some of its probable causes, and the consequences it may have on the English language. Scientific discourse can seem like a foreign language to us in the humanities, yet English really is another language for many international scientists who must use it. Jenkins and colleagues argue that English is a lingua franca today partly because most people around the world who use it are not native-speakers of it (282). In fact, daily interactions in English [End Page 286] between non-native-speakers may outnumber those they have with native speakers, or even those between native speakers themselves. That puts English in a rather unique position. But as Graddol warns, “The new language which is rapidly ousting the language of Shakespeare as the world’s lingua franca is English itself—English in its new global form … this is not English as we have known it, and have taught it in the past as a foreign language. It is a new phenomenon …” (11). The “global” English that Graddol describes can be found in scientific journals, where the quality of English varies considerably. In that genre called the scientific article, content seems more important than form. Some readers may say they ignore form and read only for content. But as we will see, style does matter. Let us consider example one: (1) Our results are in agreement with those of Ruso et al. (1996) who considered the wild species H. resinosus to be resistant to broomrape because emergence was not observed. (Labrousse et al. 862) The authors of (1), botanists from France, say their results are “in agreement with” those of others, when they mean to say their results are similar to those of others. While (1) seems odd, it may still be clearer than example two: (2) Methods of fibre analyses in faeces did not agree very well with each other. (de-Oliveira et al. 899) While the OED says that agree may be used for “persons or things: to be in agreement; to...