Monday, August 28, 2017

How Often Do Chinese Philosophy Journals Cite English-Language Work?

By Linus Huang and Eric Schwitzgebel

In a sample of elite Anglophone philosophy journals, only 3% of citations are to works that were originally written in a language other than English. Are philosophy journals in other languages similar? Do they mostly cite sources from their own linguistic tradition? Or do they cite more broadly?

We will examine this question by looking at citation patterns from several non-English languages. Today we start by examining a sample of 208 articles published in fifteen elite Chinese-language journals from 1996 to 2016. [See Note 1 for methodological details.]

In our sample of 208 Chinese-language articles, 49% (1422/2929) of citations are to works originally written in languages other than the language of the citing article, in stark contrast with our results for Anglophone philosophy journals.

English is the most frequently cited foreign language, constituting 31% (915/2929) of all citations (compared to 17% for all other languages combined). Other cited languages are German, French, Russian, Japanese, Latin, Greek, Korean, Sanskrit, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Dutch, and Tibetan.

Our sample of elite Anglophone journals contained no journals focused on the history of philosophy. In contrast, our sample of elite Chinese-language journals contains three that focus on the history of Chinese philosophy. Excluding the Chinese-history journals from the analysis, we found that the plurality of citations (44%, 907/2047) are to works originally written in English (often in Chinese translation for the older works). Only 32% (647/2047) of citations are to works originally written in Chinese (leaving 24% for all other languages combined).

Looking just at the journals specializing in history of Chinese philosophy, 98% (860/882) of citations are to works originally written in Chinese – a percentage comparable to the percentage of same-language citations in the non-historical elite Anglophone journals in our earlier analysis. Chinese journals specificially discussing Chinese history cite Chinese sources at about the same rate as Anglophone journals cite Anglophone sources when discussing general philosophy.

We were not able to determine original publication date of all of the cited works. However, we thought it worth seeing whether the English-language citations are mostly of classic historical philosophers like Locke, Hume, and Mill, or whether instead they are mostly of contemporary writers. Thus, we randomly sampled 100 of the English-language citations. Of the 100, 68 (68%) of the cited English-language works were published in the period from 1946-1999 and 19 (19%) were published from 2000 to the present.

Finally, we broke the results down by year of publication of the citing article (excluding the three history journals). This graph shows the results.

Point-biserial correlation analysis shows a significant increase in rates of citation of English-language sources from 1996 to 2016 (34% to 49%, r = .11, p < .001). Citation of both Chinese and other-language sources may also be decreasing (r = -.05, p = .03; r = -.08, p = .001), but we would interpret these trends cautiously due to the apparent U-shape of the curves and the possibility of article-level effects that would compromise the statistical independence of the trials.

Citation patterns in elite Chinese-language philosophy journals thus appear to be very different from citation patterns in elite Anglophone philosophy journals. The Anglophone journals cite almost exclusively works that were originally written in English. The Chinese journals cite about half Chinese sources and about half foreign language sources (mostly European languages), with English being the dominant language in the foreign language group, and increasingly so in recent years.

We leave for later discussion the question of causes, as well as normative questions such as to what extent elite journals in various languages should be citing mostly from the same language tradition versus to what extent they should aim instead to cite more broadly from work written in a range of languages.

Stay tuned for some similar analyses of journals in other languages!

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Note 1: The journals are: 臺灣大學哲學論評 (National Taiwan University Philosophical Review), 政治大學哲學學報 (NCCU Philosophical Journal), and 東吳哲學學報 (Soochow Journal of Philosophical Studies), which are ranked as the Tier I philosophy journals by Research Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan; and 哲学研究(Philosophical Researches), 哲学动态 (Philosophical Trends), 自然辩证法研究 (Studies in Dialectics of Nature), 道德与文明 (Morality and Civilization), 世界哲学 (World Philosophy), 自然辩证法通讯 (Journal of Dialectics of Nature), 伦理学研究 (Studies in Ethics), 现代哲学 (Modern Philosophy), 周易研究 (Studies of Zhouyi), 孔子研究 (Confucius Studies), 中国哲学史 (History of Chinese Philosophy), 科学技术哲学研究 (Studies in Philosophy of Science and Technology), which are ranked as the core philosophy journals in the Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index by Institute for Chinese Social Sciences Research and Assessment, Nanjing University, China. We sampled the research articles of their first issues in 1996, 2001, 2006, 2011, and 2016, generating a list of 208 articles. A coder fluent in both Chinese and English and with a PhD in philosophy (Linus Huang) coded the references of these articles, generating a list of 2952 citations to examine. For each reference, we noted its original publication language. Translated works were coded based on original language in which it was written rather than the language into which it had been translated. If that information was not available in the reference, Linus hand-coded by searching online or based on his knowledge of the history of philosophy. The original language was determinable in 2929 of the 2952 citations.

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