著者
Muller Theron Gallagher Nicole
出版者
富山大学教養教育院
雑誌
富山大学教養教育院紀要
巻号頁・発行日
no.2, pp.1-13, 2021-03-12

This paper presents a diachronic analysis of publication frequency and language medium for a Japanese national university’s medical faculty. Studies of trends in global writing for academic publication tend to implicate English language publication frequency increasing at the expense of publishing in national languages (Bennet, 2014). However, while increases in English language publication have been demonstrated (Fire & Guestrin, 2019), there remains little quantitative analysis of how the language publication practices of university faculty from outside the Anglophone center of higher education have changed, with Kyvik (1990, 2003), Daizen (2015), and Huang (2015) being notable exceptions. Here we diachronically analyze publication reports for a Japanese university’s medical faculty, examining annual university publication reports across two time periods, 1979 to 1980 and 2017 to 2018 for three medical subspecialties; biochemistry, internal medicine, and pathology. Across the subspecialties, English language publication in the most prestigious publication type, original journal articles, has largely come at the expense of Japanese language publication, with Japanese publications and English publications switching places in terms of frequency of publication between 1979 to 1980 and 2017 to 2018. However, less prestigious publication types have increased for both Japanese and English, suggesting that professional communication in Japanese remains important.