English Is Dominant Language of Science in Latin

America
English overtakes Spanish and Portuguese, study finds.
By 

Simon Baker for Times Higher Education

 
October 8, 2021
 

English has become the dominant language of science in Latin America, with
the use of Portuguese among Brazil-based authors in particular declining,
according to a new study.

According to the report from Clarivate’s Institute for Scientific Information,

articles in Portuguese now make up less than 15 percent of Brazil’s output in
the Web of Science database of indexed research, down from almost
30 percent in 2009.
Even in the research database SciELO, which was set up to aid scientific
communication in the region, the share of Brazil’s output that is in Portuguese
has fallen from about 70 percent in 2009 to well under half in 2020.
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Spanish-language research has seen less of a decline: although its share of

Web of Science papers among the output of countries like Argentina and
Mexico has fallen in recent years, the proportion in SciELO has remained
relatively stable.
However, English-language research has overtaken both Spanish and
Portuguese to become the most-used language in SciELO, with almost 20,000
papers indexed in 2020, as opposed to about 17,000 in Spanish and fewer
than 9,000 in Portuguese.
“English has become the dominant ‘lingua Americana’  of science,” says the
report, with “growing international collaboration” and the benefits of “enabling
access of research findings to a global network of researchers” a key driver of
the trend.
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At the same time, the report says that such collaboration is focused on
working with researchers outside Latin America -- especially the U.S., Spain,
Germany, France, Britain and, increasingly, China -- with in-region collaboration
being “uniformly low.”
It says that regional collaboration as a share of research output for Latin
America was less than 2 percent in 1981 but had only risen to around
3.3 percent in 2020. This was even lower than the Middle East, another global
region that has struggled to foster local collaboration.
Even in Brazil, the most collaborative country in Latin America, according to
the report, out of 127,400 papers involving collaboration, 10,000 had a
regional co-author but only one-quarter of these were authored solely within
Latin America.
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Jonathan Adams, chief scientist at the ISI, said it was “most concerning” that
research collaboration within Latin America remained so low given the
common challenges faced by nations in the region. Similar to the Middle East,
he suggested that regional funding coordination could aid the situation.
“There are significant potential benefits for the creation of a regional research
organization to enable further research growth, training and capacity building
to tackle common challenges across the region,” he said.
“The European research framework has undoubtedly boosted achievement
and is a model that could work equally well in Latin America.”
Despite the findings on collaboration, the report does find that research output
in Latin America has grown more rapidly than most other parts of the world
over the past 40 years, with the number of Web of Science-indexed papers
growing by more than 20 percent since 1981.
Read more by 

Simon Baker for Times Higher Education