The Academic Knowledge and Language graphic visualises the role that language of publication plays in the dissemination of academic knowledge through scholarly journals. It is obvious from first glance that English is entirely dominant.

The visualisation segments academic journals by language and country. Each country is shaded by the average impact factor of the journals published within it. Again, English language publishing has much higher penetration and impact than languages such as Japanese, Turkish or Italian. It also dwarfs that other global language, Spanish. You can view the graphic large size.

The graphic draws its data from the Thomson's Journal Citation Reports.

English is not only a dominant language because of the large number of journals published in the US and the UK. English-language journals are published in much of the rest of the world - English accounts for 86% of academic journals in the dataset.

Academic Knowledge and Publishers demonstrates how dominant the major players, Elsevier and Springer, are in scholarly publishing. View image in large format.

These visualisations are hosted at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford. The images are taken from Graham, M., Hale, S. A. and Stephens, M. (2011) Geographies of the World's Knowledge. London, Convoco! Edition.