[Bibliometric repercussions of adopting English as the sole language for publication].

Abstract

OBJECTIVE: To determine the effect that the change from French to English had on the impact of the Annales de l' Institut Pasteur. THEORETICAL REFERENCE: The Pasteur Institute journals have a prestige of over 100 years of existence and eight Nobel Prize winners in Physiology and Medicine. Changes through time on the impact of these journals can be monitored as they are included in databases of the ISI (Institute for Scientific Information). METHODS: A year by year analysis from 1974 to 1992 was done using simple regression between percentage of articles published in English and: a) their impact factor; b) their ranking among journals of the same field. RESULTS: The determination coefficient (r2) between the percentage in English and the impact factor was 0.108, and that between percentage in English and the journal's rank in similar publications was 0.178 for the Ann Microbiol, 0.045 for the Ann Immunol and 0.122 for the Ann Virol. CONCLUSIONS: The change of language did not increase the impact factor of the French journals.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 20 citations exist upstream.