Publications

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Peer-reviewed papers

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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.
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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 - the need to search and analyse literature published in languages other than English.
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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).
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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 is not widely spoken.

Media coverage / popular articles

  1. Science’s English dominance hinders diversity—but the community can work toward change. Careers article in Science (2020).
  2. Global syntheses of biodiversity require community-driven approaches to reduce bias. Our eLetter in response to a meta-analysis of insect declines published in Science (2020).
  3. When English is not your mother tongue. Career Feature in Nature (2019).
  4. The giant shoulders of English. Coverage by the Economist (2017).
  5. Cambridge zoologist says international science is overly fixated on using English. Coverage by Cambridge Independent (2017).

Presentation

  1. Language barriers in conservation and science. (2021) Lab seminar. The Invasion Science & Wildlife Ecology Group, University of Adelaide.
  2. Panelist for roundtable “Language bias as a barrier in ecological sciences: challenges and solutions toward a truly inclusive community” (2021). The 2021 Ecological Society of America annual meeting.
  3. Overcoming language barriers to academic publishing. (2021) UQ Mentoring and Diversity in Biology Workshop, The University of Queensland.
  4. Panelist for workshop “Decolonizing evolution: A conversation about how language barriers affect science and what to do about it” (2021). Virtual Evolution 2021.
  5. Why language matters in conservation and what you can do. (2021) AER Live, The Applied Ecology Resources.
  6. The translatE project: our aims and progress so far in overcoming language barriers in conservation science. (2021) CBCS Tuesday seminar. Centre for Biodiversity and Conservation Science, The University of Queensland.
  7. Is non-English-language literature important in science? (2020) Keynote presentation at the 2nd annual meeting of the Association for Interdisciplinary Meta-research and Open Science (AIMOS). Presentation slides available here.
  8. Flying over the Tower of Babel: Implications of language barriers on shorebird conservation. (2020) Keynote presentation at the International Shorebird Twitter Conference 2020 (#ISTC20).

  9. How to overcome language barriers in science. (2020) eLife #ECRWednesday Webinar. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sW7eNQp2Gkc
  10. Ignoring non-English language literature may bias ecological meta-analyses. (2019) Ecological Society of Australia 2019 annual conference, Launceston, Tasmania, Australia.