Abstract
Non-English journals still play important role in scholarly communication especially in social sciences, arts and humanities disciplines. Based on data from Web of Science and 2016 edition of Journal Citation Reports, we find that non-English publishing languages influence the journal impact factor (JIF) significantly. Journals with a high proportion of non-English publications suffer from low impact factor in both science and social sciences domains. The influence of non-English publications on JIF is weak for journals with a small proportion of non-English publications. We argue that it is not suitable to compare the JIFs of a non-English journal with an English journal which are calculated by using citation data from an international database such as Web of Science.
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