Linguistic distance to English impedes research performance
研究发现，全球大学的研究绩效（以顶级期刊发表量衡量）随着其本地语言与英语的差异增大而下降，该效应在控制多种因素后依然稳健，为政策制定者权衡英语与本地语言的使用提供了量化依据。
Today, scientific knowledge is predominantly disseminated in English. We show that global universities’ research performance, as measured by publications in top journals, declines as the differences between their local language and English increase. This effect is robust to controls for university factors like proportion of international staff and faculty-to-student ratio, as well as country-level factors like economic development, youth academic achievement, university degree rate, politics, culture, trade with and geographic distance to English-speaking countries, among others. This quantification of the research performance penalties induced by linguistic distance from the lingua franca may inform policy makers who must balance trade-offs between embracing English against cultural and local labor market pressures to orient around the local language.