Bibliometric analysis of multi-language veterinary journals

Resumen

The purpose of this study was to investigate the association between language and total number of citations found among
documents in journals written in English and other languages. We selected all the journals clustered together in the Journal
Citation Reports 2014 under the subject category “Veterinary Sciences” and downloaded all the data registered between 1994-
2013 by Web of Science for the journals that stated publishing documents in languages other than English. We classified each
of these journals by quartile and extracted information regarding their impact factor, language(s) stated, country of origin, total
number of documents published, total number of reviews published, percentage of documents published in English and the
quartile in which each journal ranked. Of the 48,118 documents published by the 28 journals analyzed, 55.8% were published
in English. Interestingly, although most of the journals state being multi-language, most documents published in quartile 1
journals were in English (an average of 99.2%), while the percentage was 93.1% in quartile 2 journals, 62.1% in quartile 3 journals
and 27.4% in quartile 4 journals. We also confirmed that citation distribution in these journals was highly skewed. The results of
this study suggest that journals should consider adopting English as the main language as this will increase citation counts and
the impact factor of the journal.