Portuguese Version

Year:  2002  Vol. 68   Ed. 5 - (1º)

Editorial

Pages: 610 to 610

PDF PT  

The ethics in disseminating knowledge

Author(s): Henrique Olival Costa

Keywords: -

The problems concerning world scientific communication go beyond those of pure and simple investigation interest. There is a clear tendency in the scientific world to use the English language as a standard for knowledge dissemination. Such a fact is a positive issue, since it provides a safe reference for naming and conceptualization of problems to all peoples of the world.

However, these principles are only sustained if we analyze data from the most basic perspective of information, in which the reasoned and sophisticated argumentation is not included.

In a sense, despite the fact that the English language keeps reports at a plain and straight forward manner, the use of English results in poor elaboration and general coherence if the authors do not have full command of the language.

Recently, in the World Congress of Otorhinolaryngology, when meeting with colleagues from all over the world, we could notice how much language difficulties can make brilliant people turn into slaves of a few idioms, submissive to their limited knowledge of the English language. It may sound as if we are referring to a sporadic situation, but the fact is that even the most fluent speakers find it difficult to make scientific sense in a foreign language. It should be perceived as a significant loss, since intelligence is not necessarily limited to English-speaking countries.

The relevance of this statement can be illustrated by an episode from the meeting of the International Editorial Board, at the Meeting of the American Academy of ENT last year. After some discussion about the flow of scientific articles in American journals, it was said that there were scarce foreign qualified papers submitted to the editorial board of the North American journals. Concerned about the fact, one of the editors suggested that the scientific studies, before their implementation, if they wanted to be later submitted to editorial appraisal, be first sent to a scientific-methodological board in the USA so as good ideas would not be missed by low quality papers (!).

I do not believe that such a comment is originated from pure intellectual prepotency, but rather from poor linguistic articulation of most of the submitted papers. However, how can we solve this problem? Shall we submit to the low levels of communication attributes of researchers or try to come up with new formulas to transmit our thoughts?

Taking this issue into account and disapproving of the international indexation agencies that are supported in bibliometric indexes such as the Citation Index, which measures how much an article in English has been read and cited in journals edited in English (at least the majority), disregarding the quality of the paper, we came up with the idea in the meetings of the Brazilian Society of Otorhinolaryngology of creating an institute that would privilege the content of journals not by its language or country of origin. Readers from all over the world would indicate their favorite local articles and, based on their indications, a master file of journals approved by the local societies would be created.

In order to implement such an institute, we knew we needed to be associated with an international organization that conveyed scientific prestige and could gather a significant number of interested people in the area of Otorhinolaryngology. Therefore, we took the opportunity of being at the World Congress of IFOS to start discussing about that, in order to implement the initially called institute of instantaneous translation in Otorhinolaryngology. The general concept of the agency would be to have local good quality journals selected by the federal societies, regardless of indexation by any agency, which would bring titles and abstracts of articles in English. The articles would be kept in an open database and, by request, they would be translated from the original language to the requesting party language, under the supervision of an Otorhinolaryngologist. Thus, high quality articles in Chinese would be read in Portuguese and vice-e-versa.

This democratization of information exchange could be measured by the index of interest for journals and articles, with no language bias, and we could learn in fact about the scientific quality of each country, in addition to opening a wide perspective of improvement for articles of quality previously considered disposable because of language barriers.

The work has barely begun but we are always allowed to dream!

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