Top Five Reasons to Improve Your Scientific Writing as a Non-Native English Speaker

Scientific writing is hard. It is even harder if English is your second (or third) language. Non-Native English speakers face unique challenges to mastering scientific writing and often prefer to focus on other technical elements of their scientific training and careers. However, scientific writing skills are essential to professional development, and the advantages of being a strong English writer are considerable. Here are the top five reasons to improve your scientific writing as a non-native English speaker:

1) Save Time

Scientific writing takes time. Each step of the writing process, including literature review, outlining, writing, editing, and formatting, requires a substantial amount of dedicated time and attention. Both anecdotal reports and published research suggest that non-native English speakers require substantially more time to complete scientific writing tasks.

How much more time does it take for researchers to write in English when English is a foreign language?

One Chinese graduate student told Chang and Kanno,

 "[I] and write[assignments] which would only take native-English-speaking students two days but take me five...”

Cameron et al. interviewed international research trainees in the United States about the time it takes them to create presentations, abstracts, or posters. The vast majority of non-native English Speakers reported that scientific writing takes them two to five times longer than for native English speakers.

 Difficulty with writing scientific articles in English has also been repeatedly emphasized by students and researchers in other articles.

• Hanauer and Englander (2011) reported that scientific researchers say that, on average, writing scientific articles in English as a second language was 24% more difficult than writing in the researchers’ first language.
• Among Chinese academics interviewed by Mu and Zhang, two-thirds reported that their most significant barrier to deciding to publish in English rather than Chinese was the time burden associated with writing in English.
• A non-native English-speaking fellow at an American academic medical center emphasized to Pagel et al. that the iterative process of writing and editing is particularly challenging in English, noting:

 “Sometimes I change a paragraph five or 10 times to try to say something as an American would say it. That’s the hardest part.”

 Non-native English speakers also commonly report experiencing initial journal rejections based on aspects of their writing, including grammar and organization. One reviewer comment noted by Li and Flowerdew read:

“The quality of the language is far below the acceptable minimum level, to such a point that many sentences are simply not understandable. The paper cannot be published as it stands.”

 Such comments are not uncommon. Nearly half of Colombian PhD students reported in Ramırez-Castañeda that they have had a manuscript rejected on the basis of grammar.

 Journal rejections further add to the time burden of writing scientific manuscripts in a non-native language. A study in PLoS One found that researchers spend, on average, three hours simply formatting a manuscript according to journal submission guidelines. Three hours spent on reformatting a manuscript following each rejection can quickly create a considerable time burden before even considering the time involved with an additional round of editing to improve the manuscript prior to submission.

Investing in improving your scientific writing in English can yield substantial long-term savings in the time needed to write, edit and successfully publish your manuscripts, abstracts, presentations, and dissertations.

2) Gain Professional Opportunities

 “I like this guy, but he would probably do better [elsewhere]. He’s not our caliber.”  -Patel et al.

 Comments like that quoted above, spoken by a native English-speaking faculty member at an American academic medical center, reveal the negative biases and assumptions that many non-native English speakers face while navigating scientific careers in the United States.

In fact, nearly all international research trainees surveyed by Cameron et al. say that their level of English has interfered with professional opportunities ranging from productivity with grants and presentations to promotion or hiring delays.

 Scientific writing ability does not just impact which professional opportunities that trainees (i.e., PhD students and fellows) ultimately receive; scientific communication skills have been shown to directly impact which opportunities trainees decide to pursue in the first place.

• In Cameron et al., students’ perceived self-efficacy in scientific communication impacts their intention to pursue a research-centered career in academia.
• A second study by Cameron et al. similarly reported that self-efficacy in scientific communication predicts the likelihood that trainees will pursue any research-intensive career, academia or otherwise.

To summarize, graduate students who are confident in their ability to effectively communicate in English are more likely to pursue careers in scientific research.

 Even for those researchers who never step foot in the United States, English publishing is often a prerequisite to achieving professional milestones.

• Obtaining a PhD:
  • In China, many doctoral programs require publication in a Science Citation Index journal, which are generally in English (Li 2016). 
• Gaining Employment:
  • Job advertisements and employment contracts for academic positions in China were reviewed by Xu et al. They found that academics were often required to have a certain number of English publications. In one example, job applicants for a lecturer position were required to have at least seven Chinese publications or one English publication, demonstrating the high value placed on English publications.
• Obtaining Tenure:
  • Outside of the United States, publication in internationally indexed journals (i.e., English) is often required to obtain tenure (Lee and Lee 2012).
  • Even in places where English publications are not explicitly required for promotion and/or tenure, English language publications may be implicitly required given that English journals tend to have higher impact factors and citation counts, thereby lending credibility to the quality of an academic’s research (Bocanegra-Valle 2014).
  • In the publish or perish world of academia, English writing skills can mean the difference between success and failure. One life scientist interviewed by Corcoran (2019) emphasized, “[when you] enter academia there is no way that you can survive if you don’t read and write in English”
• Monetary Incentives:
  • Many academic institutions further incentivize publishing in English language journals through the use of monetary incentives (Lee and Lee 2012, Xu et al 2019).

In summary, English language scientific writing ability not only shapes graduate students’ career goals but also alters the trajectory of researchers’ career opportunities and advancement.

3) Save Money

The costs of editing services for academic publishing can add up quickly. Here, we walk through examples of how much students and faculty researchers may spend on editing services.

Many editors charge $50-$150/hr or $0.04-$0.15/word, often depending on the scope of edits required. For example, at Oxford Editing, copy editing costs 3.5-4 cents per word. However, a heavy edit, which addresses many of the issues commonly faced by non-native English speaking researchers – grammar, sentence and paragraph structure, document-level organization, and making the writing more concise – costs $0.13 a word.  

Consider the following scenario for Kunal, a new assistant professor. Kunal is expected to produce two first author publications per year – in addition to minor author manuscripts – over the course of his six-year pre-tenure probationary period. His manuscripts average 5000 words each.

• If Kunal struggles with many of the most common issues faced by non-native English speakers and requires substantive editing for sentence and paragraph structure, he can expect to pay at least $3,000 on editing.
• If Kunal requires specialized editing due to the technical nature of his writing (which can reach $150/hr) or heavy editing, his expected pre-tenure costs for editing may surpass $9,000.

While the scenario and numbers above may appear high, they risk underestimating the financial burden of editing services. The Annals of Thoracic Surgery published an editorial recommending language editing by an editor who can “decipher the author’s intended meaning” and translate it into standard English. Such editing notably requires someone with expertise in the field and may typically require “5 to 8 hours.” At a rate of $150/hr for a specialized editor in the field, the cost per manuscript for editorial assistance could top $1000.

Consider a second scenario: Fawzi is completing a PhD outside of the United States but hopes to publish his dissertation and manuscripts in English to increase his competitiveness for a faculty position. Fawzi, whose advisor is not equipped to fully edit his publications given time and language constraints, needs content editing that makes substantive revisions in the content, methods, and grammar of his writing. He obtains content editing for two manuscripts and his 40,000-word dissertation at a total cost of $4,000.

Even if Kunal and Fawzi can use departmental funding for these services, the costs required for substantive editing could have been redirected the need for editing services was eliminated or reduced to the much lower cost of minor copy-editing. For example, Kunal could fund 600 hours of research assistant time (at $15/hr). Fawzi could invest in taking short courses at international conferences.

Investing in improving your scientific writing now can generate substantial, long-term savings and free up funding for other productive endeavors.

 4) Gain more productive reviewer feedback

Peer review is the foundation of scientific publishing. To publish successfully, authors must convince reviewers of the innovation, validity, and significance of their work.  Further, reviewer feedback is critical for the successful revision and resubmission of articles for publication.

 Non-native English speakers report that feedback from manuscript reviewers often focuses on critiquing their grammar rather than their scientific methods and reporting (Drubin 2017). English as an additional language health and life sciences researchers provided Corcoran (2019) examples of reviewer and editor feedback on their writing, including:

• “Please check English and resubmit”
• “This is very badly written. If they cannot properly write in English, how can they do an experiment?”

Indeed, nearly half (44%) of the reviewer comments on clinical research manuscripts written by non-native English speakers and analyzed by Mungra and Webber (2010) focused on language use rather than methodological criticism or content. Examples of these types of comments included:

• "the abstract too would benefit from some grammatical restructuring…”
• “non-standard English is used throughout the manuscript… so much so that it prevents, at times, the manuscript from being comprehensible.”

While calls have been made better support the participation of non-native English speaking researchers in scientific publications, scientists continue to report receiving English and grammar-focused reviews. This feedback crowds out constructive reviewer comments that better equip researchers to improve their data analyses and results presentation and interpretation.

By improving your scientific writing, you can work towards receiving a greater proportion of content-focused, constructive feedback from peer-reviewers that better equips you for journal acceptance. 

 5) Improve the Reach of Your Research

The goal of publishing original research is to disseminate research findings and substantially advance scientific understanding or medical practice.

Publishing metrics, including journal acceptances, impact factors, and citation counts, give us an idea of how successfully research is being disseminated. Studies with each metric have shown that manuscripts published in English achieve greater reach among the scientific community.

Journal Acceptances

 Higher English proficiency can improve your likelihood of journal acceptance. One scientific writing consultant with behind-the-scenes experience with journal editors told Corcoran (2019) about her experience with editors sending articles back to authors before peer-review due to the writing quality, saying:

“I’ve seen it happen, watched it happen. I’ve been in the room with [other] science editors who say we want to see publications from emerging nation authors – we want to publish those papers…and then an hour later they’re saying “I’m getting all these papers and the English is so poor that the peer reviewers can’t understand them so we have to send them right back and say get help with your English.” They have to because they don’t have the time or money to put into it.”

 While editors will often counter sentiments that less than native English writing proficiency dramatically hampers scientists’ publication abilities, (e.g., “If the science is good and the message intelligible, we make our best effort to work with the author to make it work Corcoran (2019)”), both anecdotal and empirical reports suggest that English proficiency does impact journal acceptances.

Saposnik et al. (2014) analyzed ~15,000 original contributions to the major medical journal Stroke. Their study showed that submissions from non-English-speaking countries had significantly lower odds of journal acceptance, even after controlling for relevant factors like research funding and number of authors.

Impact Factor

While the use of impact factor as a proxy for the relative importance of scientific journals has garnered criticism, the measure remains a relevant indicator in most fields. 

In one study (McKiernan et al. 2019), approximately 40% of research-intensive universities in the United States and Canada reported using journal impact factor during the promotion and tenure (P&T) review process.

Impact factors are significantly higher in English-language journals than non-English language journals (Vinther and Rosenberg 2012), suggesting that publications in English-language journals often convey increased prestige and/or recognition, including in the P&T process for academic researchers. This finding has been reported across numerous fields.

• General internal medicine journals published in English have significantly higher impact factors than those published in other languages (Mueller 2006).
• Similar findings were reported among rheumatology journals (Chen et al. 2011) and orthopedic journals (Moverley 2013).
• Among multi-language journals, journals that publish larger shares of English articles have higher impact factors (Diekhoff et al. 2013).

Taken together, this evidence clearly suggests that an ability to publish in English-language journals, or multi-language journals that primarily publish in English, opens doors for researchers to disseminate their findings in more prestigious journals and/or journals that may have greater a reach in the scientific community.

Citation Counts:

Citations are often used as a marker of research quality and/or scientific impact. The vast majority of 129 public and private universities in the US and Canada refer to citation counts in their promotion and tenure documents (Alperin 2019). More importantly, citations mean that other researchers are reading your work and feel that it is an important contribution to the literature in your field.

Articles published in English receive more citations than those published in other languages (Di Bitetti and Ferreras 2016). This oft-cited finding from Di Bitetti and Ferreras has been echoed in studies from around the world and across languages and fields.

• Poomkottayil et al. (2011), reported that papers published in English were 6-7 times more likely to be cited than articles published in German or French.
• In Brazilian ophthalmology journals, English articles were twice as likely to be cited as those written in Portuguese (Lira et al. 2013)
• Chemistry articles published in a multi-language or non-English journals receive nearly 50% fewer citations than those in English journals (Bornmann et al. 2012).

These results suggest that English articles often reach a larger audience and resonate with more researchers in your field, elevating the visibility and impact of your work.

By improving your ability to publish in English language publications, you can expand the reach and impact of your research.

The Bottom Line: In this blog, we discussed the top five reasons to improve your scientific writing as a non-Native English speaker.

• Save Time
• Gain Professional Opportunities
• Save Money
• Gain More Productive Reviewer Feedback
• Improve the Reach of your Research

If you’re ready to take the next step with your scientific writing, we invite you to join us at the Scientific Writing Academy, where we teach you practical, efficient ways to improve your writing using real-life examples while connecting you with a community of other students and professionals working towards the same goals of increased confidence and productivity.