Archive

25 Mar Chowdhury, S., Gonzalez, K., Aytekin, M.Ç.K., Baek, S.-Y., Bełcik, M., Bertolino, S., Duijns, S., Han, Y., Jantke, K., Katayose, R., Lin, Mu-M, Nourani, E., Ramos, D.L., Rouyer, M.-M., Sidemo-Holm, W., Vozykova, S., Zamora-Gutierrez, V., & Amano, T. (2022) Growth of non-English-language literature on biodiversity conservation. Conservation Biology.

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It is often assumed that non-English-language literature is diminishing, as science is becoming increasingly globalised. In this paper we show that the number of conservation articles published per year is actually increasing in many languages, at a rate similar to English articles....

06 Dec Khelifa, R., Amano, T. and Nuñez, M.A. (2021) A solution for breaking the language barrier. Trends in Ecology & Evolution.

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We propose a potential solution to overcoming language barriers in science - developing a platform for facilitating the exchange of language skills among researchers....

08 Oct Amano, T., Berdejo-Espinola, V., Christie, A.P., Willott, K., Akasaka, M., Báldi, A., et al. (2021) Tapping into non-English-language science for the conservation of global biodiversity. PLOS Biology 19(10): e3001296.

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Can we keep ignoring non-English-language science? We found 1,234 papers in 16 languages that test what works in conservation. Including them will boost evidence availability in conservation into 12-25% more areas and 5-32% more species....

15 Jul Amano, T., Rios Rojas, C., Boum II, Y., Calvo, M. and Misra, B. B. (2021) Ten tips for overcoming language barriers in science. Nature Human Behaviour. 5: 1119–1122

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Language barriers have multiple major consequences for scientists, the advance of science, and its impact on societies. We need a concerted effort from all – both non-native and native English speakers. Here we have listed ten things you can start doing today. ...

15 Feb Lynch, A.J., Fernández-Llamazares, Á., Palomo, I., Jaureguiberry, P., Amano, T., Basher, Z., Lim, M., Mwampamba, T.H., Samakov, A. and Selomane, O. (2021) Culturally diverse expert teams have yet to bring comprehensive linguistic diversity to intergovernmental ecosystem assessments. One Earth 4: 269-278.

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A new One Earth paper found that despite the involvement of linguistically-diverse experts in IPBES assessments, references cited were predominantly in English and comments from Anglophone reviewers were also overrepresented in those assessment reports....

07 Jan Nuñez, M.A. and Amano, T. (2021) Monolingual searches can limit and bias results in global literature reviews. Nature Ecology & Evolution 5: 264.

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A perspective article recently published in Nature Ecology & Evolution (Haddaway et al 2020) nicely reviews various problems with ecological literature reviews and provides methodological solutions to address those problems. Nevertheless, we found that a key issue was not covered by the perspective article -...

08 Jun Konno, K., Akasaka, M., Koshida, C., Katayama, N., Osada, N., Spake, R. and Amano, T. (2020) Ignoring non-English-language studies may bias ecological meta-analyses. Ecology and Evolution 10: 6373-6384.

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By reanalysing existing meta-analyses including both English- and Japanese-language studies, we show that effect sizes differ significantly between English- and Japanese-language studies, causing considerable changes in overall mean effect sizes and even their direction when Japanese-language studies are excluded (see figure below)....

08 Jun Amano, T., González-Varo, J.P. and Sutherland, W.J. (2016) Languages are still a major barrier to global science. PLOS Biology 14: e2000933.

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This piece was our initial attempt to review how language barriers affect science in two directions: (i) when compiling knowledge globally and (ii) when applying knowledge to local environmental issues....

08 Jun Amano, T. and Sutherland, W.J. (2013) Four barriers to the global understanding of biodiversity conservation: wealth, language, geographical location and security. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Science 280: 20122649.

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In this paper we found that the availability of data stored in biodiversity databases is highly geographically biased (see figure below), and the proportion of English speakers in each country partly explains the distribution, with a fewer records per area stored for countries where English...