How multilingual is scholarly communication? Mapping the global distribution of languages in publications and citations

Abstract Language is a major source of systemic inequities in science, particularly among scholars whose first language is not English. Studies have examined scientists' linguistic practices in specific contexts; few, however, have provided a global analysis of multilingualism in science. Using two major bibliometric databases (OpenAlex and Dimensions), we provide a large‐scale analysis of linguistic diversity in science, considering both the language of publications ( N = 87,577,942) and of cited references ( N = 1,480,570,087). For the 1990–2023 period, we find that only Indonesian, Portuguese, and Spanish have expanded at a faster pace than English. Country‐level analyses show that this trend is due to the growing strength of the Latin American and Indonesian academic circuits. Our results also confirm the same‐language preference phenomenon (particularly for languages other than English), the strong connection between multilingualism and bibliodiversity, and that social sciences and humanities are the least English‐dominated fields. Our findings suggest that policies recognizing the value of both national‐language and English‐language publications have had a concrete impact on the distribution of languages in the global field of scholarly communication.