English as the lingua franca of international publishing

As a contribution to debates about the predominance of English as a global lingua franca, this paper presents a study of worldwide publishing rates in the natural and social sciences. Bibliometric data from Scimago's index of Elsevier's Scopus database show: (1) a general increase in indexed documents from 1996–2015 that has outpaced increases in world population and gross world product (GWP); (2) stark disparities between nations of the center and periphery (whether defined in economic or linguistic terms); and (3) steady reductions in these disparities. It can be inferred from these data that indexed journals are becoming more nationally diverse in their contents, though the appearance of high rates of change for a small subset of countries should be attributed to indexing factors rather than real progress.