Grey literature on bilingualism in Belgium
J. Schöpfel
INIST-CNRS and research groupe “Document
Numérique & Usages“
Abstract
Because of the town
Bilingualism, the learning and use
of two or more languages, is a linguistic, social, educational and
psychological reality for many people and most countries. In the heart of
Europe,
The particularity of our study is
twofold: First, the research on bilingualism is interdisciplinary, at the
crossroad of linguistics, sociology, psychology and educational sciences, each
domain presenting its own vectors of publication and communication. Second,
while most of the previous studies on the importance of grey literature are
citation analyses, our study is based on search results from databases,
catalogues, open archives and search engines.
Notes
on the author
Joachim
Schöpfel obtained
his Ph.D. in psychology from the
Contact address
Dr. Joachim Schöpfel, INIST-CNRS, 2 allée du Parc de Brabois, 54519 Vandœuvre-lès-Nancy,
France. E-Mail: schopfel@inist.fr
1. On the (relative) importance of grey
literature
Grey literature has a role of its own
as a means of distributing scientific and technical information, and
professionals insist on its importance for two main reasons: research results
are often more detailed in reports, doctoral theses and conference proceedings
than in journals, they are distributed in these forms up to 12 or even 18
months before being published elsewhere, and some results simply aren’t
published elsewhere.
But how do researchers use grey
literature? One way of evaluating this is to analyze the citations given in
their publications. Schöpfel & Farace 2007 provide some empirical evidence
based on a synthesis of different scientometric studies (see table 1).
Field |
Grey literature citations (in %) |
Soil science |
14% |
Biology |
5-13% |
Veterinary medicine |
6% |
Psychiatry (addiction) |
1% |
Psychology |
3% |
Engineering Sciences |
39-42% |
Economics |
9-17% |
Sociology |
7-9% |
Education Science |
14-19% |
Table 1: Part of grey literature in different
scientific domains
The relative importance of grey
literature is largely dependent on research disciplines and subjects, on
methodological approaches, and on sources used. In some fields, especially the
life sciences and medical sciences, there has been a traditional preference for
conventional distribution media (journals), while in others, such as
agriculture, aeronautics and the engineering sciences in general, grey
literature resources tend to predominate[1].
A small study of bibliographic
references published in four different journals in library and information
sciences revealed that grey literature accounts on average around 20% of all
sources used. Even so, citations to grey material vary widely between different
papers from 0% to 50% and more, depending at least in part on subject areas and
methodologies. Most of the non-commercial documents can clearly be identified
as unpublished material, doctoral or master theses, proceedings, reports, legal
texts, working papers, lecture notes, websites, and even posted messages. But
especially for some conference proceedings and other serial resources, the
identification of the exact nature of the cited material poses difficulties.
In order to add more empirical evidence
on the position of grey literature in scientific publishing, especially in
Social Sciences and Humanities, we carry out an alternative approach that is
complementary to the citation analyses mentioned above.
We select a scientific field in
Social Sciences and Humanities with a specific relationship to the hosting town
of the conference GL9 (bilingualism in Belgium), we define a recent time period
(2000-2007), we investigate with usual search tools the scientific production
(databases, catalogues, search engines, repositories), and finally we evaluate
the part of grey literature of this production. Our leading questions were:
(1) What is the scientific
production on bilingualism in
(2) How important is grey
literature for this scientific activity?
(3) What are the particular
features of grey literature in this field?
The following section provides a
global overview on
2. Bilingualism as an object of scientific study
In our global village, learning
and using two or more languages is an everyday reality of many people and most
countries. Among the most important reasons for this reality are immigration, international
commerce and business, linguistic and cultural minorities. In the heart of
Europe, Belgium presents two more particularities: the nation is composed of
two cultural and linguistic populations, the French-speaking Walloons in the
South and the Dutch-speaking Flemish in the North, while its capital, Brussels,
is also the capital of Europe with important international institutions, such
as the Commission of European Communities, the European parliament and the NATO
headquarter[2].
Verbal behaviour is linked to
economic, social, historical, political, psychological, educational and
linguistic factors. Thus, the scientific regard on bilingualism is manifold and
depends on the specific background and methodology of the scientist: the psychologist
will study the influence of motivation, attitude and cognitive development, the
social scientists will focus on identity, role and social group, the linguist
will analyse cross-linguistic semantics and syntactic, the educational
researcher will evaluate the output of bilingual programs, a psychiatric
specialist will publish case studies on pathological verbal behaviour, and a
historian will try to understand the cultural, political and economic roots of
bilingualism. In many cases, research on bilingualism is conducted by
interdisciplinary teams, developing original psycholinguistic, sociolinguistic,
psycho-pedagogical or even neuro-linguistic approaches[3].
Figure 1: Publications on
bilingualism 2000-2007 – scientific domains (Scopus)
50% of recent literature in the
Scopus database (from 648 items published between 2000 and 2007) is from social
sciences, while psychology, medicine, arts and humanities and neurosciences
account for 20-35% (see figure 1).
Figure 1 shows also that articles on
bilingualism are partly published in journals indexed in more than one
scientific discipline.
In spite of the universal
character of bilingualism, only some countries developed a significant amount
of scientific research on bilingualism.
Another analysis of the Scopus
database reveals that 7 countries produce 85% of the recent literature on
bilingualism (see figure 2).
Not surprisingly, more than the
half of the indexed literature is published by American or Canadian scientists.
All the same,
Figure 2: Publications on
bilingualism 2000-2007 – countries (Scopus)
3. Methodology
Bibliographic searches in
scientific databases and library catalogues and with STI and general search
engines were carried out to identify the Belgian scientific production on
bilingualism. The following databases were selected:
SCI
Science Citation Index (ISI Web of Knowledge)
SSCI
Social Science Citation Index (ISI Web of Knowledge)
A&HCI
Arts and Humanities Citation Index (ISI Web of
Knowledge)
Scopus
(Elsevier)
IBSS
International Bibliography of the Social Sciences (CSA)
ERIC (CSA)
PAIS International (CSA)
Social Services Abstracts (CSA)
Dissertation Abstracts (ProQuest)
PsycARTICLES
(Ovid)
PASCAL
(INIST)
FRANCIS
(INIST)
ISD
(INIST)
Together
they cover the core of scientific production (WoK, Scopus, the INIST databases,
Diss. Abstr.) and more specific domains related to bilingualism (social
science, humanities). The databases were accessed through the national CNRS
SS&H portal “BiblioSHS”[4]
or via the local academic campus. Only regret: for technical reasons the Linguistics
Abstracts database could not be accessed.
The Belgian academic library
catalogues that reflect the major national scientific holdings were accessed
via the union OPAC Libis, via the
Complementary searches were undertaken
with three mostly used generalist and STI search engines:
Scirus
(Elsevier)
Google
Scholar
Google
The Directory of Open Access Repositories[5]
(OpenDOAR) was used to identify and search in Belgian open archives. We
searched also directly on different institutional web sides (university home
pages) for institutional and/or thematic open repositories.
The study was untertaken between May
and November 2007.
The search criteria were:
The search strategy was rather iterative
than linear, alternating between databases and catalogues, repositories and
search engines in order to complete affiliations and references, confirm free
access and check for other publications from identified authors or co-authors.
Based on the search results two file
sheets were created, one with information on authors (first and last name,
institution/affiliation, domain and sub-domain), another with information on
publications (first author, presence of co-authors, short title, language, year
of publication, type of publication, free access on the web, deposit in
repository). Data analyses combined information from both tables.
4. Results
The three leading questions for
the data analysis are:
(1) What is the scientific
production on bilingualism in
(2) How important is grey
literature for this scientific activity? What is the part of theses, reports
and conference proceedings compared to the overall production of results of the
research on bilingualism in
(3) More specifically, what are
the particular features of grey literature in this field? Special attention is
paid to the importance of digital information available on the Web, on academic
or personal pages or in institutional repositories and other open archives.
Based on empirical evidence, the
following sections try to provide at least partial responses.
4.1. Publications: number, year, language and
category
Search results in databases,
catalogues and repositories and on the web allow for the identification of 164
different publications on bilingualism in
Figure 3: Publication year (sample)
85% of the identified documents
are published in English, 13% in French and 5% in Flemish; 2 documents are in
Spanish, one in German and another in Italian.
Most of the documents are
published as articles in scientific journals (see figure 4).
Figure 4: Publication category
(sample)
30% are dissertations (e.g.
doctoral or master theses), working papers or communications held in
conferences. The rest – less than 10% - are book chapters, reports, a
monograph, a book with a conference proceedings and a poster.
4.2. Authors, institutions and domains
The 164 publications are written
by 81 first authors to whom we added 5 co-authors clearly identified as being
affiliated to Belgian academic institutions. Most of the first authors have published
one or two documents on bilingualism between 2000 and 2007 but three
researchers from the Ghent University occupy a more important and noticeable
position: Jan Blommaert with 27 publications, Marc Brysbaert with 9
publications and Robert Hartsuiker with 6 publications.
Affiliation
of first author |
Number
of publications |
|
75 |
|
13 |
|
11 |
|
10 |
Lessius Hogeschool |
5 |
Kempen Hogeschool |
4 |
|
4 |
|
2 |
|
2 |
|
2 |
|
1 |
|
1 |
Not identified or non
Belgian |
34 |
Table 2: Affiliation of first author
(sample)
The first authors are affiliated
to 12 Belgian scientific institutions, even if some of them are also affiliated
to institutions in other countries, such as
Obviously the most important Belgian
institution for research on bilingualism is the Ghent University with nearly
50% of all publications of the 2000-2007 sample. Four academic campus – Ghent,
Leuven (KUL), Antwerp and Brussels (ULB) – cover together 2/3 of the scientific
production on bilingualism. 20% of the publications can not be clearly linked
to an university or another Higher Education structure or research center, or
are written by an author affiliated to a non Belgian institution.
For each publication the major
scientific domain was derived from the authors’ affiliation, from database
indexing and from the topic of publication[7]
(see figure 5).
Figure 5: Scientific domains of
publications (sample)
Psychology and Linguistics cover together
80% of the sample. The remaining 20% are from other disciplines, e.g.
Education, Communication, Neurosciences, Political Sciences, Economics and
Business, Literature, History and even Informatics.
Nevertheless, we can distinguish more
specific and/or interdisciplinary approaches such as Cognitive Science,
Experimental Psychology and Neuropsychology for the Psychology discipline, Ethnography
and African Language and Cultures for Linguistics, and Psycholinguistics at the
intersection of both disciplines. Some typical subjects of publications:
Compared to the international
production (content of the Scopus database, see figure 1), there seem to be
significantly less Belgian publications on bilingualism in Social and Medical
Sciences but as we did not match up our indexing to the Scopus index, this may
be at least partly biased by our method.
4.3. Features of grey literature
In our sample, 55 documents (34%)
correspond to the criteria of the New York definition of grey literature, e.g. “which
is produced on all levels of government, academics, business and industry in
print and electronic formats, but which is not controlled by commercial
publishers i.e. where publishing is not the primary activity of the producing
body” (GL6, 2004).
Nearly half of these grey documents (45%)
are dissertations (master or doctoral theses), another 31% are unpublished
working papers, and 15% are communications (see figure 6).
Figure 6: Typology of grey documents
(sample)
A closer look on these documents
reveals some differences with the “white” publications:
Production: The average
number of grey literature is not increasing but stable (around 6-8 publications
per year) or slightly decreasing (only 2 identified grey documents in 2005).
Language: The part of
non English publications is significantly higher than of articles. While 95% of
the published articles and book chapters are in English, the percentage of
English grey literature is only 64%, e.g. one third of grey documents are
written in French (18%), Flemish (13%) or other languages.
Domains: The part of
disciplines other than Linguistics or Psychology is slightly higher (24%) than
for articles (18%).
Institutions: In
contrast, there seems to be no significant difference regarding to scientific
institutions, e.g. no one of them produce more or less grey literature compared
to white output.
Authors: The grey
documents were published by 38 first authors (47% of all first authors). 24 of
them (63%) didn’t publish anything else during the observed time period.
Grey to white: Based
on the comparison of titles, we can suppose that in at least 8 cases (15%) it
exists a direct relationship between grey and white publications, the grey
document (working paper, communication, dissertation) preceeding one, two or
even four years the publication of an article or a chapter on the same subject.
4.4. Open access to grey documents
For each of the 55 grey documents
internet searches were performed, firstly with the mentioned search engines,
then with the OpenDOAR search facility, finally directly in some major Belgian
academic repositories, especially from the institutions to which the first
authors are affiliated. The results are shown in figure 7.
Figure 7: Web access to grey
documents (sample)
23 documents (42%) can be accessed on
the Web, most of them (20 documents or 36%) are deposited in an open, mainly
institutional repository.
Compared to the different categories
of grey documents, a tendency or bias can be discerned: In our sample, reports
and working papers are more often accessible on the web while dissertations are
less. Maybe that this last tendency is related to our choice to include master
theses in the sample that are less often deposited on an academic web sites
than doctoral theses. In some rare cases access to documents seems to be lost.
5. Discussion
The presented results are limited
by some factors related to the methodology and/or to the subject of the study,
e.g.
Language:
Belgian academics publish in at least three languages, English, French and
Flemish. As a matter of fact, international scientific databases are strongly
biased and contain mainly English publications. Even if we tried to
counterbalance this bias by searching directly in Belgian catalogues and
repositories, searching in Flemish is more difficult than in French or English,
even for a German-speaking professional. So some Flemish publications may
simply have been overlooked.
Affiliations:
Analysis of affiliations was limited to the first author. Nevertheless, 56% of
the publications of the sample are co-authored. To gather an in-depth and more
comprehensive look on the scientific production of the Belgian academic and
research institutions, affiliations of the co-authors should be evaluated.
Scientific fields:
Differing from the Scopus database, we only indexed the main scientific domain
for each publication which introduces a bias to the major disciplines, e.g.
Psychology and Linguistics.
Interdisciplinary:
As mentioned above, bilingualism is an object of interdisciplinary research
interest. In some “borderline” cases it is not obvious to decide whether a given
publication is part of research on bilingualism or should be excluded from the
sample, bilingualism being only a marginal topic of limited interest.
The “Belgian aspect” of research:
The sample contains (mostly) publications from Belgian authors as well as
(some) studies on bilingualism in
Repositories:
Some of the visited institutional repositories provide rather limited search
facilities. The alternative approach, browsing or searching “from outside”
based on OAI metadata protocol harvesting, may exclude some publications on
bilingualism from the sample.
In spite of these limitations, the
main results of the study seem to be sufficiently significant and can be
resumed as follows:
(1) Scientific production on
bilingualism in
(2) Importance of grey literature:
One third of the publications on bilingualism are grey, nearly half of them are
master or doctoral theses, followed by working papers and communications.
(3) Particular features of grey
literature: Compared to white publications (articles),
the part of non English documents is more important. Two third of the authors
of grey documents didn’t publish their results in articles or books; a smaller
part of grey information was published in journals up to four years later.
Nearly half of grey publications are freely available on the web, most of the
time in institutional (academic) repositories.
6. Conclusion
The goal of our research was to
provide additional empirical evidence on the importance of grey literature in Social
Science and Humanities, based on a sample of recent publications. The selected
topic, bilingualism, is not a strategic or frontline domain such as
biotechnology or genomics. Its specificity lies in the interdisciplinary
approach, at the frontier of social sciences, humanities and medical sciences
and in the strong relationship with the societal environment.
Our sample shows a dynamic and
developing scientific research activity and production where the grey
literature occupies a significant place, complementary to the articles
published in academic journals. Its signification – more than 30% of all
publications - can be described by three aspects, timeliness, uniqueness, and
community.
Timeliness:
One part of the grey documents, in particular dissertations, working papers and
communications, present research results one or more years before formal and
peer reviewed publications.
Uniqueness:
Apparently, one part of the research results presented in grey documents has not
been published elsewhere so far, and probably will not be. In these cases, grey
literature is the only vector of scientific communication.
Community:
Whereas articles in scientific journals are mainly published in English and
available for the international scientific readership, grey literature is
partly published in the community-specific languages Flemish and French and
thus more deeply linked to the Flemish and Walloon scientific communities.
What about quality? Articles
published in scientific journals - 62% in our sample – have undergone the usual
quality control of scientific information, selection by editors, peer review,
revision. Nevertheless, at least 60% of the grey documents have also been
evaluated before publication: dissertations are evaluated by academic commissions;
and communications have been selected by conference program committees and commented
by the public (auditors), followed in some cases by revision before publication.
The “quality gap” between grey and white appears thus to be rather relative
than absolute, grey literature being at least partly published with added value
through scientific peer evaluation.
A final comment should be made on
open access to grey literature. The OpenDOAR site records actually (November
2007) 14 institutional, two disciplinary and one aggregating repository located
in
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[1] See also Schöpfel et al. (2005) and Farace et al.
(2006).
[2] See for instance Swenden & Jans (2006).
[3] See for instance some highly cited studies on
bilingualism such as Portes & Schauffler (1994), Fabbro (2001), Leseaux
& Siegel (2003) and Hartsuiker et al. (2004).
[6] E.g. bilingual, bilingualism, bilingue,
bilinguisme, tweetalig, tweetaligheid, second language…
[7] E.g. title, abstract, author’s key words
[8] See for instance Lynch (2003) , Correia &
Neto (2002) and Davis & Connolly (2007).