What is it about?
In Nature 556, 174; 2018, Lazarev and Nazarovets claimed to have been discriminated by not being cited only because they published their research in Russian language. This is a problem which many people publishing their results in languages other than Russian face, and the scientific community should not keep indifferent. After reading their correspondence I imposed myself the duty of re-analyzing the literature cited in a paper of my authorship, with the specific aim of finding related papers published in Chinese or Russian languages. This was, however, a hard task, as I realized I did not know where to search for literature being published in those languages. I reached the Ukrainian Panteleimon database (http://www.panteleimon.org), and although it has a poorly-designed interface and it has been said to be incomplete (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2584036/), at least tackles part of the problem. There is some sort of (paywalled) alternative for Chinese scientific literature (China Knowledge Resource Integrated Database, http://oversea.cnki.net). Both databases mine data and translate title, abstract and some further info into English. At this point I felt somehow relieved, but then I wondered whether I should have cited any of these papers. Nevertheless, one should not cite research she/he has not read in full, or at least seen and understood the results and the experimental design. To my relief, the China Knowledge Resource Integrated Database provided in some cases translation of figure legends and tables, but no information about the peer review of the papers. Latindex, the Online Regional Information System for Scientific Journals from Latin America, the Caribbean, Spain and Portugal (http://www.latindex.org) provides an interface allowing to switch into English, Spanish, Portuguese and French, but they do not translate any contents.
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Why is it important?
In times where finding funding for scientific research becomes increasingly hard, it seems absurd to have scientific effort and public resources being put into research that has already been made and published elsewhere before, only because it has not been indexed by MEDLINE, and because of our own incompetence in several languages.
Perspectives
In the era of Sci-hub and artificial intelligence, the scientific community should claim for a multi-language translation tool, so that people could search foreign language-based databases (what is foreign for science?, I wonder...) and get results in their mother tongue, or at least into English. Such a tool could be continually perfected with help of the community, as has occurred with the RELISH (RElevant LIterature SearcH, http://pubmed.ict.griffith.edu.au) consortium, where authors provide their own input to what the algorithm selects. We all agree that science is naturally collaborative and cumulative, and I think it is time a tool that should not only be accessible to the community but easy to find and properly credit.
Dr Daniel Prieto
Instituto de Investigaciones Biologicas Clemente Estable
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Make research-paper databases multilingual, Nature, August 2018, Springer Science + Business Media,
DOI: 10.1038/d41586-018-05844-0.
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