Multilingual publication practices in the social sciences and humanities at a Polish university: choices and pressures

ABSTRACT

Sharing research results internationally has become a hallmark of modern science. In many countries, scholars are expected to publish in journals that promise high citation scores, boosting the recognition of the authors and institutions they represent. Since most of such indexed journals are English-medium, these expectations influence the choice of the publication language, a problem particularly relevant in the social sciences and humanities (SSH), where research is often embedded in specific cultural contexts. This paper presents the results of a study on multilingual publication practices among SSH scholars at the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland. It looks into the present and future language choices, reasons for these decisions, and the role of science policy in shaping the linguistic landscape of the SSH disciplines. The analysis is based on data collected in a survey and retrieved from the university publication reports for the evaluation period 2017–2021. The results demonstrate the dominant position of Polish and a strong and growing position of English, with a small share of publications in other languages. The findings point to the role of evaluation schemes in decisions regarding the publication language and the need for a science policy that fosters multilingual research practices.

KEYWORDS:

• multilingual publishing
• multilingual researchers
• research dissemination
• social sciences and humanities
• science policy

Acknowledgments

We thank Aneta Drabek from the Scientific Information Centre and Academic Library of the University of Silesia in Katowice for making the publication reports available for use in this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 On the problems and challenges related to the implementation of Bologna recommendations, especially by the Central European signatories of the Declaration, see, e.g., Kwiek (2004).

2 Regulation of the Polish Minister of Science and Higher Education of 13 July 2012 (Journal of Laws 2012, item 877).

3 The ongoing evaluation period has been extended due to the COVID-19 pandemic and lasts 5 years.

4 Another point of criticism is the lack of transparency in the allocation of points to individual journals (Krzemińska, 2021; Adamski, 2021). For more details about the composition of the lists and related controversies, see Drong, 2020 and Wojtaszek, 2021.

5 Regulation of the Polish Minister of Science and Higher Education of 22 February 2019 (Journal of Laws 2019, item 392).

6 Regulation of the Rector of the University of Silesia No. 186 of October 26, 2020, on the rules of awarding one-time pro-quality grants.

7 Regulation of the Polish Minister of Science and Higher Education of 13 July 2012 (Journal of Laws 2012, item 877).