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Nazarovets S. & Mryglod O. Multilingualism of Ukrainian Humanities: how it is seen globally. 18th
International Conference on Scientometrics & Informetrics; KU Leuven, Belgium. 2021. p. 1521-1522.
1521
Multilingualism of Ukrainian Humanities: how it is seen globally
Serhii Nazarovets1 and Olesya Mryglod2
1 sergiy.nazarovets@gmail.com
State Scientific and Technical Library of Ukraine, Antonovycha Str 180, 03680 Kyiv (Ukraine)
2 olesya@icmp.lviv.ua
Institute for Condensed Matter Physics of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Svientsitskii Str 1,
79011 Lviv (Ukraine)
Introduction
Dissemination of knowledge in the Humanities
occurs through the use of different languages and
different types of documents. Many studies of
recent years consider the issue of proper evaluation
of scientific non-English achievements of
Humanities (Pedersen, Grønvad, & Hvidtfeldt,
2020). Such a lively interest can be partially
explained by many examples of misuse of metrics
in order to assess the impact of research in
Humanities. In recent years such popular initiatives
as DORA, Leiden Manifesto, Metric Tide, Helsinki
initiative attracted the attention of the scientific
community to the problem of correct evaluation of
non-English works.
However, the other side of the coin, which is
related to the importance of international evaluation
of results in Humanities, is not always properly
addressed to by researchers. The exclusive focus on
the local level also leads to negative consequences:
lack of independent review, decrease of the quality
and relevance of scientific results.
The research policy of Ukraine, which became
independent in 1991, inherited many Soviet
remnants. For a long time scientists in Ukraine have
been rewarded primarily for publications in national
journals in their native language (Hladchenko, &
Moed, 2021). The locally-nested character of
research together with such formal stimulations
create the preconditions for harmful self-isolation
and ―invisibility‖ of Ukrainian Humanities.
The aim of this work is to investigate the volume
and language distribution of publications by
Ukrainian researchers in Humanities indexed in
Web of Science (WoS). Further, a number of other
non-English-speaking countries of Eastern Europe
with similar post-Soviet background is chosen for
comparison.
Language is an important factor influencing the
coverage of a country's scientific publications by
Web of Science, especially in the Humanities
(Mongeon & Paul-Hus, 2016) for non-English-
speaking countries. However, this database – one of
the most used for scientometric studies – can be
considered as a prism through which national
research output is seen globally. Therefore, despite
all cautions, the data from Web of Science Core
Collection are used in this work.
Method and Data
The metadata about publications by Ukrainian
authors (at least one Ukrainian affiliation per paper)
in Philosophy, History and Literature in 2010-2019
from WoS Core Collection were used: total number
of records, language distribution, information about
journals where English-language works were
published. The comparative analysis was performed
using the same data (same period) for few other
non-English speaking Eastern European Slavic
countries: Poland, Czech Republic and Slovakia.
An example of search query: CU=Ukraine AND
PY= (2019 OR 2018 OR 2017 OR 2016 OR 2015
OR 2014 OR 2013 OR 2012 OR 2011 OR 2010)
AND SU=Philosophy. The date of data retrieval is
10.01.2021.
Results
Our results show that according to WoS, choosing
different languages for publications is typical for
scientists from the analyzed countries of Eastern
Europe in the fields of Philosophy, History and
Literature (see Fig. 1-3). The share of publications
in other than national language is explicitly defined
if it is significant: Russian language for Ukraine;
Slovak language for Czech Republic; and Czech
language for Slovakia.
Figure 1. Language distributions of publications
by authors from different countries: Philosophy
(2010-2019).
Nazarovets S. & Mryglod O. Multilingualism of Ukrainian Humanities: how it is seen globally. 18th
International Conference on Scientometrics & Informetrics; KU Leuven, Belgium. 2021. p. 1521-1522.
1521
Figure 2. Language distributions of publications
by authors from different countries: History
(2010-2019).
Figure 3. Language distributions of publications
by authors from different countries: Literature
(2010-2019).
Depending on the discipline and country, the ratio of
English-language publications in other languages
varies. For example, the shares of papers in the field
of Philosophy written in English by Polish and
Slovak authors during 2010-2019 are significantly
different: 81% and 24%, correspondingly. At the
same time, in the fields of History and Literature,
scholars from all considered countries demonstrate
similar behavior in the context of publication
language choice.
In addition, our results shows that a significant
share of English-language papers in Philosophy,
History and Literature by authors from Eastern
European countries are found in the journals
published in the same country.
Conclusions
The results confirm the findings of previous
studies: it is natural for Humanities to publish
research outputs in various languages not being
concentrated exclusively on English. This is
quantitatively illustrated for Ukrainian, Polish,
Slovak and Czech authors. Moreover, language
particularities are observed for different countries.
Due to historical circumstances, Russian language
plays substantial role for Ukrainian Humanities,
which is particularly notable and rather
counterintuitive for the Literature. But only since
2017 Ukrainian becomes the official language of
the educational process. E.g., Russian language is
much less influential in Poland, where it was
compulsory until 1989, see (Kulczycki, Rozkosz, &
Drabek, 2019). Similarly, the mutual language
influences are noticeable for scholar publications of
Slovak and Czech Republics.
The majority of English-language articles in
Humanities by researchers from the considered
Eastern European countries and indexed in WoS
correspond to the journals published in the country
of authors. This practice needs to be studied more
carefully, but there is an agreement with
conclusions drawn in (Nazarovets, 2020).
Unfortunately, the lack of sufficiently large
statistics does not allow to perform the temporal
analysis of Ukrainian publication data presented in
WoS. The potential changes in language spectrum
in response to implementation of new rules would
provide an answer to the question about the
possible impact of research policy on the scholar
publication strategy.
Our preliminary results suggest that natural
multilingualism of Humanities has to be taken into
account during the process of research evaluations,
especially based on quantitative approaches and
metrics.
References
Pedersen, D. B., Grønvad, J. F., & Hvidtfeldt, R. (2020).
Methods for mapping the impact of social sciences
and humanities—A literature review. Research
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https://doi.org/10.1093/reseval/rvz033
Hladchenko, M., & Moed, H. F. (2021). National
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Kulczycki, E., Rozkosz, E. A., & Drabek, A. (2019).
Internationalization of Polish Journals in the Social
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analysis. Scientometrics 106, 213–228.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-015-1765-5
Nazarovets, S. (2020). Controversial practice of
rewarding for publications in national journals.
Scientometrics, 124(1), 813-818.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03485-7
