English as a gatekeeper in global medicine

Sir,

We read with interest the editorial by Sharma and Cotton ¹ on English hegemony being a language barrier in the academic world. We have also noticed several neologisms used in the Indian Journal of Surgery, particularly from China or Turkey, such as “Patients’ data was anonymized” or “progressive anemization.” ² These neither improve the text nor demonstrate good English usage.

However, the hegemony of the English language has been exploited by many academic journal publishers, who demand that authors pay an editing service charge of an average of US$370 before being considered for publication by high-impact journals. ³ This service is provided in four tiers – Advanced editing, Premium editing, Premium editing plus, and Scientific editing, each with a distinct cost that must be borne by the author. ⁴

A staggering 80% of all indexed journals and the world's top 50 journals are in English, ^{5 , 6} and non-native English speakers are 2.5 times more likely to face language-related manuscript rejection than native English speakers. ⁷ PubMed contained over 36 million publications up to 2023, with 86.5% in English. ⁸

A prospective author must choose a journal that encourages simple, clear English and the use of pre-submission editing services, preferably have a co-author as an English-speaking colleague, and ask international collaborators for help while reviewing and editing. There are short courses and workshops on scientific writing. ⁹

Recently, ChatGPT-4 has arrived on the scene to contribute to better English communication abilities. ¹⁰

William Whimster may have the last word:

The ideal of communication is that a clear message goes straight from the writer's brain into the reader's brain. However, it very rarely does go in a straight line because there are distractions. These distractions cause the message to meander about and generally cloud what you are trying to say. ¹¹