ABSTRACT
More disturbing is the fact that citations of articles written in Africa, Latin America and Oceania to other articles in the same region were halved in the same ten-year period. In the period 1993-1995, 22 percent of the references in African papers were to African social science journals. Ten years later, this proportion had fallen to only 11.7 percent. The decline is even stronger in Asia. The two major social science producers, Europe and North America, have experienced a small decline in the references to articles coming from the same region, “indicating better recognition of foreign contributions” (p. 153). These proportions of language distribution depend a lot on the sources of data/databases used. Nonetheless, English still remains a strongly dominant language in all files reviewed. For example, a very detailed analysis done by Keim (2010) shows that in Sociological Abstracts (1995-1998), 45 percent of the production (26,136 references) comes from the United States, 13 percent from the UK, followed by Germany (4.6 percent), Australia (3.9 percent), France (3.6 percent) and the Netherlands (2.9 percent). All other countries have less than 1 percent, and 95 countries (out of 166 “peripheral” countries) have no reference at all. The African continent represents 1.3 percent – less than Spain – while Asia has 3 percent and Latin America 4.1 percent. The Arab world is practically absent from this database. Ten years later (2005-2008), the United States represents 43.5 percent (23,475 references), and the UK 14 percent (7,573 references). Africa represents 2.5 percent, Asia 5.5 percent and Latin America 3.6 percent. There are more data from Ammon (2010) showing that English is the dominant language: since 1965, when Sociological Abstracts began, from 81.7 percent (1965-1970) to 85.5 percent (1995-1998) of documents were in English; this information comes from probably the most balanced database in social sciences, along with International Bibliography of the Social Sciences (IBSS).
