COVID19 Research for the English Speaking World: Health Communication During a Pandemic

Since COVID-19 first appeared, enormous numbers of scientific articles have been published on this subject every day, and these articles have been brought to the attention of millions of people. People make great efforts to obtain information about COVID-19, however, the public cannot access health information under equal conditions. On the other hand, one of the important missions of science is informing the public, and language is one of the essential channels of this mission. The main aim of this commentary is to analyse the languages of the published articles on COVID-19 to reveal the language trends. To achieve this aim, we evaluated 10,728 publications listed in WHO’s Global COVID-19 database. As a result, although 125 different countries publish articles on COVID-19, our findings show that English, as the universal language of science, is dominant. Scientists prefer the English language for their articles; in fact, this preference is the expected choice because of the international effect of the virus and reaching the whole world. However, all these English-language papers serve the inbound mission of science communication. It is important to convey the results of the research to the public, and in this study, the general features of the non-English journals are determined, and various suggestions are presented in order to make science communication more effective.