Abstract

PORTILLA GEADA, Néstor de la. Publishing on Psychiatry: in Spanish... or in English?. Salud Ment [online]. 2012, vol.35, n.6, pp.459-464. ISSN 0185-3325.

Traditionally, medicine has had an intercommunicating language for use amongs doctors all over the world. Psychiatry has not been an exception, and after a period in which Latin was the "lingua franca", this position was consequently occupied by French, German, and, to a smaller degree, English. Starting with the Second World War, and for obvius reasons, this latter language dominated this position in an absolute manner in a way never before achieved, except perhaps for Latin. There is, however, a huge difference, in that, while Latin was no one's mother tongue, and everyone, including psychiatrists from Romance languages countries, had to learn it, English is the mother tongue for more than four hundred millions persons in the so called First World, many of whom are responsible for the inmense majority of the research carried out in our discipline. An imposition has been placed in the Academic Media, obliging the writing of articles for high impact Journals if one aspires promotion, and the ten Journals of greatest impact in Psychiatry are written in English without exception. Should our reseachers write in another language rather than their owns? What true possibility do they have of having their articles published in those Journals? How many of their tongue peers will have access to that information? These are the questions we will try to answer in this paper.

Keywords : International language; impact factor; bias; psychiatric journals; ghostwriter.