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The language barrier and institutional provincialism in science
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Drug and Alcohol Dependence 92 (2008) 1–2
Editorial
The language barrier and institutional provincialism in science
Keywords: Databases; Langauge problems; Non-English language; Cytisine; Bupropion; Alcohol; Foetal alcohol syndrome
Publication in a peer-review journal does not necessarily lead to adequate dissemination of important research findings and this is particularly the case when the report is not in the English language. The first barrier is the failure of the most widely used databases such as MEDLINE and PsychInfo to index many non-English journals. The overwhelming majority of active researchers rely heavily on these databases when they search the literature either to keep their own knowledge up-todate or to prepare bibliographies for publications. The second barrier is the seemingly ready acceptance by many scientists of the proposition that such literature may be ignored because it will be derivative rather than innovative and that its quality will be poor, and the findings will therefore be unimportant. Neither of these potential limitations of non-English language publications is valid. Seminal papers have appeared in other languages whereas the literature in English contains many articles of a repetitive and derivative nature; how many times have we not, after reading an English language paper, asked ourselves “so what’s new about that?” The translation of research data into prevention and treatment should not be hampered by language issues and yet this is precisely what has happened and will continue to happen unless active steps are taken to eliminate it. To support this position we refer to examples of research on tobacco and alcohol. The first example is evident in this issue of Drug and Alcohol Dependence where Etter et al. (2008) consider the steps needed to allow determination of the value of the alkaloid cytisine as an aid to cessation of tobacco smoking. Cytisine is not a newly synthesized product of a large interdisciplinary team using sophisticated combinatorial chemistry. It occurs naturally in the seeds of the laburnum tree and the fact that it interacts with nicotinic receptors has been known for decades. More to the point, claims for its value in smoking cessation were published in the 1960s. The quality of these reports varied but there were some controlled trials that reported efficacy and preparations of cytisine such as Tabex became widely used in several East European countries. It seems not to have been used in other countries. The barriers to dissemination here were the related facts that most trials were carried out in East European countries and the find0376-8716/$ – see front matter © 2007 Published by Elsevier Ireland Ltd. doi:10.1016/j.drugalcdep.2007.07.010
ings were not reported in English. The results were not wholly convincing and, as noted by Etter et al. (2008), even the strongest trials did not match all current criteria, but compare the impact of these findings with that of the English language reports about the use of bupropion in smoking cessation; the original findings on this substance were reported as English language abstracts in journals that are not in MEDLINE and therefore do not have an impact factor (Ferry and Burchette, 1994; Ferry and Schopper, 1996), but within a short period of time a slow-release preparation of bupropion was developed and tested in large-scale trials. Would this have happened if the reports were in a language other than English? Even more interesting is the fact that Western pharmaceutical science has produced the synthetic compound varenicline and within a short time at least five controlled trials have appeared, indicating therapeutic efficacy greater than that of nicotine replacement therapy (Cahill et al., 2007). Like cytisine, varenicline appears to act as a partial agonist at neuronal nicotinic receptors and it was identified after a series of syntheses that began with modifications of the cytisine molecule (Rollema et al., 2007). We feel that the English-speaking and Anglo-Saxon orientated scientific and clinical community, to which the present authors belong, may have been too ready to dismiss the findings with cytisine due to a biased view of the merits of East European science published in languages other than English. The second example of the consequences of the language barrier to which we refer is the discovery of the foetal alcohol syndrome. The first report in the medical literature appears to be that of Lemoine et al. (1968) which was published in French. This study of 127 offspring of mothers who drank heavily during pregnancy described foetal abnormalities that resembled those of the condition now known as the foetal alcohol syndrome. It received little attention. Subsequently Jones et al. (1973), seemingly unaware of the earlier publication, reported in the English language on eight cases showing craniofacial, limb and cardiovascular defects that were associated with impaired growth and development, triggering much further research that eventually led to widespread awareness of a major health problem. The language barrier may have delayed the onset of campaigns to
2
Editorial / Drug and Alcohol Dependence 92 (2008) 1–2
reduce excessive prenatal alcohol consumption by several years. On the other hand, the scientists and clinicians who carried out the early work on alcohol apparently did not consider that they had a duty to communicate their finding to the English-speaking community. The same constraint seems to have been applicable to those who worked on cytisine in relation to smoking, as discussed above. The problem of language as a barrier to communication is difficult to solve. The Language Issues Working Group of the International Society of Addiction Journal Editors (ISAJE, 2007) has identified some possible courses of action. In the writers’ view no single solution will suffice and a multi-modality approach should be adopted. Firstly, it will be important to increase the visibility of non-English language publications in the international scientific community. The major databases should shoulder their responsibilities and be more open to nonEnglish language journals. Journals that publish in languages other than English should as a minimum consider various measures that will increase their possibilities of being included in the major databases. Among these measures are the inclusion of English abstracts of papers, an English version of the Table of Contents, and translations of the journal title (the full list of suggestions may be seen at www.isaje.net). Secondly, journal editors, particularly of journals that consider themselves international, should acknowledge the importance of reserving extra resources for supporting language editing and fair refereeing processes for papers submitted by persons who do not have English as their mother tongue. International scientific cooperation across the language and national borders will meanwhile automatically strengthen the importance of English as a lingua franca for all researchers. Thirdly, international funding agencies should support the translation of key papers into English so that a wider range of experts have access to them. Fourthly, research training for native speakers of English should include an obligatory course in an appropriate foreign language, to increase the conceptual sensitivity of scientists and their competence to build contacts across language borders. Scientific institutions and journals often claim that they are international. However, Pasterkamp et al. (2007) demonstrated that most scientists have a nation-oriented citation bias; in a study of 1200 publications on the cardiovascular system, citations to publications from the same country were more than 30% greater than expected by chance. In absolute numbers, this was most pronounced in the USA, but in relative terms nationoriented bias was more common in other countries. The language barrier between English and other languages is another factor that increases what we call institutional provincialism within science, by which we mean polices and practices within entities such as journals which imply that they have a de facto local or limited perspective. There is a relationship with the circumstances that led Horton (2003) to coin the term “editorial racism” to describe the (unintended) consequences of the way biomedical journals select their content (see also Tyrer, 2005). The practical importance of overcoming language barriers and challenging the institutional provincialism of addiction science is not quantifiable, but the cases of cytisine and of alcohol show
extreme examples of the consequences: massive benefits to public health might have accrued more rapidly if important findings had been disseminated adequately. Conflicts of interest The authors are former Presidents of ISAJE and KS was Chair of its Language Issues Working Group and thus they participated in formulating the ISAJE proposals advocated in the editorial. IPS has published laboratory research on cytisine but neither author has any connection with the manufacturers of products that contain it. Acknowledgement Contributions: Author IPS wrote an incomplete first draft. KS contributed additional material, concepts and comments, based upon which IPS produced the final version. References Cahill, K., Stead, L.F., Lancaster, T., 2007. Nicotine receptor partial agonists for smoking cessation. Cochrane Database Syst. Rev. CD006103. Etter, J.-F., Kukas, R.J., Benowitz, N.L., West, R.J., Dresler, C., 2008. Cytisine for smoking cessation: a research agenda. Drug Alcohol Depend. 92, 3–8. Ferry, L.H., Burchette, R.J., 1994. Efficacy of bupropion for smoking cessation in non-depressed smokers. J. Addict. Dis. 13, 249. Ferry, L.H., Schopper, V., 1996. Bupropion and nicotine replacement therapy for smoking cessation in an open clinical trial. J. Invest. Med. 44, A120. Horton, R., 2003. Medical journals: evidence of bias against the disease of poverty. Lancet 361, 712–713. ISAJE (International Society of Addiction Journal Editors) 2007. Non-English Language Working Group, www.isaje.net.(accessed 10 July 2007). Jones, K.L., Smith, D.W., Ulleland, C.N., Streissguth P, 1973. Pattern of malformation in offspring of chronic alcoholic mothers. Lancet 301, 1267–1271. Lemoine, P., Harousseau, H., Borteyru, J.B., Menuet, J.C., 1968. Les infants des parents alcooliques. Anomalies observees, a propos de 127 cas. Ouest. Med. 21, 476–482. Pasterkamp, G., Rotmans, J.I., de Kleijn, D.V.P., Borst, C., 2007. Citation frequency: a biased measure of research impact significantly influenced by the geographical origins of research articles. Scientometrics 70, 153–165. Rollema, H., Coe, J.W., Chambers, L.K., Hurst, R.S., Stahl, S.M., Williams, K.E., 2007. Rationale, pharmacology and clinical efficacy of partial agonists of ␣42 nACh receptors for smoking cessation. Trends Pharmacol. Sci. 28, 316.325. Tyrer, P., 2005. Combating editorial racism in psychiatric publications. Br. J. Psychiatry 186, 1–3.
Ian P. Stolerman ∗ Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London, London SE5 8AF, UK Kerstin Stenius Nordisk Alkohol & Narkotikatidskrift, 00531 Helsinki, Finland ∗ Corresponding
author. Tel.: +44 207 848 0370. E-mail address: [email protected] (I.P. Stolerman) 21 July 2007 Available online 7 September 2007
Drug and Alcohol Dependence 92 (2008) 1–2
Editorial
The language barrier and institutional provincialism in science
Keywords: Databases; Langauge problems; Non-English language; Cytisine; Bupropion; Alcohol; Foetal alcohol syndrome
Publication in a peer-review journal does not necessarily lead to adequate dissemination of important research findings and this is particularly the case when the report is not in the English language. The first barrier is the failure of the most widely used databases such as MEDLINE and PsychInfo to index many non-English journals. The overwhelming majority of active researchers rely heavily on these databases when they search the literature either to keep their own knowledge up-todate or to prepare bibliographies for publications. The second barrier is the seemingly ready acceptance by many scientists of the proposition that such literature may be ignored because it will be derivative rather than innovative and that its quality will be poor, and the findings will therefore be unimportant. Neither of these potential limitations of non-English language publications is valid. Seminal papers have appeared in other languages whereas the literature in English contains many articles of a repetitive and derivative nature; how many times have we not, after reading an English language paper, asked ourselves “so what’s new about that?” The translation of research data into prevention and treatment should not be hampered by language issues and yet this is precisely what has happened and will continue to happen unless active steps are taken to eliminate it. To support this position we refer to examples of research on tobacco and alcohol. The first example is evident in this issue of Drug and Alcohol Dependence where Etter et al. (2008) consider the steps needed to allow determination of the value of the alkaloid cytisine as an aid to cessation of tobacco smoking. Cytisine is not a newly synthesized product of a large interdisciplinary team using sophisticated combinatorial chemistry. It occurs naturally in the seeds of the laburnum tree and the fact that it interacts with nicotinic receptors has been known for decades. More to the point, claims for its value in smoking cessation were published in the 1960s. The quality of these reports varied but there were some controlled trials that reported efficacy and preparations of cytisine such as Tabex became widely used in several East European countries. It seems not to have been used in other countries. The barriers to dissemination here were the related facts that most trials were carried out in East European countries and the find0376-8716/$ – see front matter © 2007 Published by Elsevier Ireland Ltd. doi:10.1016/j.drugalcdep.2007.07.010
ings were not reported in English. The results were not wholly convincing and, as noted by Etter et al. (2008), even the strongest trials did not match all current criteria, but compare the impact of these findings with that of the English language reports about the use of bupropion in smoking cessation; the original findings on this substance were reported as English language abstracts in journals that are not in MEDLINE and therefore do not have an impact factor (Ferry and Burchette, 1994; Ferry and Schopper, 1996), but within a short period of time a slow-release preparation of bupropion was developed and tested in large-scale trials. Would this have happened if the reports were in a language other than English? Even more interesting is the fact that Western pharmaceutical science has produced the synthetic compound varenicline and within a short time at least five controlled trials have appeared, indicating therapeutic efficacy greater than that of nicotine replacement therapy (Cahill et al., 2007). Like cytisine, varenicline appears to act as a partial agonist at neuronal nicotinic receptors and it was identified after a series of syntheses that began with modifications of the cytisine molecule (Rollema et al., 2007). We feel that the English-speaking and Anglo-Saxon orientated scientific and clinical community, to which the present authors belong, may have been too ready to dismiss the findings with cytisine due to a biased view of the merits of East European science published in languages other than English. The second example of the consequences of the language barrier to which we refer is the discovery of the foetal alcohol syndrome. The first report in the medical literature appears to be that of Lemoine et al. (1968) which was published in French. This study of 127 offspring of mothers who drank heavily during pregnancy described foetal abnormalities that resembled those of the condition now known as the foetal alcohol syndrome. It received little attention. Subsequently Jones et al. (1973), seemingly unaware of the earlier publication, reported in the English language on eight cases showing craniofacial, limb and cardiovascular defects that were associated with impaired growth and development, triggering much further research that eventually led to widespread awareness of a major health problem. The language barrier may have delayed the onset of campaigns to
2
Editorial / Drug and Alcohol Dependence 92 (2008) 1–2
reduce excessive prenatal alcohol consumption by several years. On the other hand, the scientists and clinicians who carried out the early work on alcohol apparently did not consider that they had a duty to communicate their finding to the English-speaking community. The same constraint seems to have been applicable to those who worked on cytisine in relation to smoking, as discussed above. The problem of language as a barrier to communication is difficult to solve. The Language Issues Working Group of the International Society of Addiction Journal Editors (ISAJE, 2007) has identified some possible courses of action. In the writers’ view no single solution will suffice and a multi-modality approach should be adopted. Firstly, it will be important to increase the visibility of non-English language publications in the international scientific community. The major databases should shoulder their responsibilities and be more open to nonEnglish language journals. Journals that publish in languages other than English should as a minimum consider various measures that will increase their possibilities of being included in the major databases. Among these measures are the inclusion of English abstracts of papers, an English version of the Table of Contents, and translations of the journal title (the full list of suggestions may be seen at www.isaje.net). Secondly, journal editors, particularly of journals that consider themselves international, should acknowledge the importance of reserving extra resources for supporting language editing and fair refereeing processes for papers submitted by persons who do not have English as their mother tongue. International scientific cooperation across the language and national borders will meanwhile automatically strengthen the importance of English as a lingua franca for all researchers. Thirdly, international funding agencies should support the translation of key papers into English so that a wider range of experts have access to them. Fourthly, research training for native speakers of English should include an obligatory course in an appropriate foreign language, to increase the conceptual sensitivity of scientists and their competence to build contacts across language borders. Scientific institutions and journals often claim that they are international. However, Pasterkamp et al. (2007) demonstrated that most scientists have a nation-oriented citation bias; in a study of 1200 publications on the cardiovascular system, citations to publications from the same country were more than 30% greater than expected by chance. In absolute numbers, this was most pronounced in the USA, but in relative terms nationoriented bias was more common in other countries. The language barrier between English and other languages is another factor that increases what we call institutional provincialism within science, by which we mean polices and practices within entities such as journals which imply that they have a de facto local or limited perspective. There is a relationship with the circumstances that led Horton (2003) to coin the term “editorial racism” to describe the (unintended) consequences of the way biomedical journals select their content (see also Tyrer, 2005). The practical importance of overcoming language barriers and challenging the institutional provincialism of addiction science is not quantifiable, but the cases of cytisine and of alcohol show
extreme examples of the consequences: massive benefits to public health might have accrued more rapidly if important findings had been disseminated adequately. Conflicts of interest The authors are former Presidents of ISAJE and KS was Chair of its Language Issues Working Group and thus they participated in formulating the ISAJE proposals advocated in the editorial. IPS has published laboratory research on cytisine but neither author has any connection with the manufacturers of products that contain it. Acknowledgement Contributions: Author IPS wrote an incomplete first draft. KS contributed additional material, concepts and comments, based upon which IPS produced the final version. References Cahill, K., Stead, L.F., Lancaster, T., 2007. Nicotine receptor partial agonists for smoking cessation. Cochrane Database Syst. Rev. CD006103. Etter, J.-F., Kukas, R.J., Benowitz, N.L., West, R.J., Dresler, C., 2008. Cytisine for smoking cessation: a research agenda. Drug Alcohol Depend. 92, 3–8. Ferry, L.H., Burchette, R.J., 1994. Efficacy of bupropion for smoking cessation in non-depressed smokers. J. Addict. Dis. 13, 249. Ferry, L.H., Schopper, V., 1996. Bupropion and nicotine replacement therapy for smoking cessation in an open clinical trial. J. Invest. Med. 44, A120. Horton, R., 2003. Medical journals: evidence of bias against the disease of poverty. Lancet 361, 712–713. ISAJE (International Society of Addiction Journal Editors) 2007. Non-English Language Working Group, www.isaje.net.(accessed 10 July 2007). Jones, K.L., Smith, D.W., Ulleland, C.N., Streissguth P, 1973. Pattern of malformation in offspring of chronic alcoholic mothers. Lancet 301, 1267–1271. Lemoine, P., Harousseau, H., Borteyru, J.B., Menuet, J.C., 1968. Les infants des parents alcooliques. Anomalies observees, a propos de 127 cas. Ouest. Med. 21, 476–482. Pasterkamp, G., Rotmans, J.I., de Kleijn, D.V.P., Borst, C., 2007. Citation frequency: a biased measure of research impact significantly influenced by the geographical origins of research articles. Scientometrics 70, 153–165. Rollema, H., Coe, J.W., Chambers, L.K., Hurst, R.S., Stahl, S.M., Williams, K.E., 2007. Rationale, pharmacology and clinical efficacy of partial agonists of ␣42 nACh receptors for smoking cessation. Trends Pharmacol. Sci. 28, 316.325. Tyrer, P., 2005. Combating editorial racism in psychiatric publications. Br. J. Psychiatry 186, 1–3.
Ian P. Stolerman ∗ Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London, London SE5 8AF, UK Kerstin Stenius Nordisk Alkohol & Narkotikatidskrift, 00531 Helsinki, Finland ∗ Corresponding
author. Tel.: +44 207 848 0370. E-mail address: [email protected] (I.P. Stolerman) 21 July 2007 Available online 7 September 2007