Posted on by jana obsteter

Call for Interest: “Native” Language Science in Insect Research

Call for Interest: “Native” Language Science in Insect Research

As discussed in the last Management Committee meeting, we propose exploring insect science published in our native languages and we would like to gauge interest in pursuing this work. Science beyond English often contains overlooked knowledge published in local journals. A survey in 16 languages revealed that 36% of published scientific documents on biodiversity conservation were not in English.* And we suspect some research still relevant for the insect breeding industry would go “unnoticed” because it is not published in English. One can easily argue that most impactful research is in international journals, but there might still be important work only generated in native languages (see Appendix A for a list of work discussing the case in biodiversity, ecology, and sustainability).

This might have several reasons: local appointment criteria may require publishing in the native language; due to language barriers people might not feel confident enough to publish in a foreign language; some might fear their research would not seem important in an international context; some may prefer faster review procedures; others specifically aim to reach local industry and practitioners (e.g., beekeeping); and in certain agricultural sciences there is an established culture of publishing in one’s own language.

In a preliminary exercise, we queried Google Scholar (English interface) for the scientific names of five focal insect species: Hermetia illucens, Tenebrio molitor, Acheta domesticus, Bombyx mori, and Apis mellifera. Restricting results to the past decade yielded approximately 111,000 records. Running the same queries through 11 other language interfaces returned ~34,000 records for the same period. Yet when we removed language constraints entirely, the total was only ~117,000, suggesting that the English counts were substantially inflated. This is likely because many non-English publications include bilingual abstracts. This pattern indicates that a large fraction of related work in Google Scholar is published in languages other than English, at least ~35% in this dataset (see Appendix B for species-level hit counts per language).

What we propose and how we plan to proceed

We are considering a collaborative review paper to identify and synthesise insect science published in native languages. The initial scope may focus on species of interest from major farmed insect orders (e.g., black soldier fly, yellow mealworm, honey bee, cricket, and silkworm) and topics/keywords relevant for the Action (genetic diversity, mating behavior, GxExC, breeding, phenotyping, genetic evaluation, nutrition, health, consumer acceptance, etc.).

We will hold an in-person WG 7 and WG 8 joint meeting in İzmir, Turkey, on April 13-14. In that workshop we hope to bring together participants across languages to:

1. Decide on the review method.
2. Clarify species, topic keywords, and article inclusion criteria.
3. Form subgroups to start gathering overlooked findings in local publication databases and native language research in the last decade or so.
4. Identify research themes and quantitative trends via first screening of Abstracts.
5. Synthesise subgroup findings to pave the way for future efforts.
6. Produce dissemination and communication material for any interesting workshop outputs.

In the future, we may also:

1. Use text mining & topic analysis to compare themes in native language articles vs. English to identify knowledge gaps or to build a keywords network.
2. Circulate a short questionnaire to assess language barriers to understand experiences of participants in the field in general or within this Action and probably in other insect related Actions/Consortia.
3. Translate abstracts using AI to make relevant but overlooked findings accessible in our Knowledge Hub.

CALL TO COLLABORATE

We invite Insect-IMP members to build a team to work on this review effort. We especially encourage women and early-career researchers from Inclusiveness Target Countries and colleagues beyond Europe to link up with the proposed activity. Asia, Africa, and Latin America are among the places where insects are part of the local human diet and where probably a lot of research goes published only locally. The process itself might help us go beyond Europe and link with these regions and open new collaborations by revealing who works on what in different regions and across languages. We hope the overall work will indicate where language barriers affect access to or production of useful work.

If you wish to contribute, please fill in this Google Form until February 22 for: 1) languages you can cover, 2) species/topics of interest, and 3) any specific contributions (e.g., methods, analysis, or writing). Based on expression of interest and previous active participation in working group meetings, we will send e-COST invitations for the in-person meeting.

Thank you for considering this proposal. We believe that shining a light on native language research will not only enrich our Action’s output, but also demonstrate the global nature of insect science. We look forward to potentially working with many of you on this effort.

Insect-IMP Core Group

Appendix A: Examples discussing the potential of native language science

  • *Amano T, González-Varo JP, Sutherland WJ (2016) Languages Are Still a Major Barrier to Global Science. PLoS Biol 14(12): e2000933. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.2000933
  • Amano, T., Berdejo-Espinola, V., Akasaka, M. et al. The role of non-English-language science in informing national biodiversity assessments. Nat Sustain 6, 845–854 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-023-01087-8
  • Hannah, K., Fuller, R. A., Smith, R. K., Sutherland, W. J., & Amano, T. (2025). Language barriers in conservation science citation networks. Conservation Biology, e70051. https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.70051
  • Chowdhury, S., Gonzalez, K., Aytekin, M. Ç. K., Baek, S. -. Y., Bełcik, M., Bertolino, S., Duijns, S., Han, Y., Jantke, K., Katayose, R., Lin, Mu-M, Nourani, E., Ramos, D. L., Rouyer, M. -. M., Sidemo-Holm, W., Vozykova, S., Zamora-Gutierrez, V., & Amano, T. (2022). Growth of non-English-language literature on biodiversity conservation. Conservation Biology, 36, e13883. https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.13883
  • Amano T, Ramírez-Castañeda V, Berdejo-Espinola V, Borokini I, Chowdhury S, Golivets M, et al. (2023) The manifold costs of being a non-native English speaker in science. PLoS Biol 21(7): e3002184. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002184
  • Konno K, Akasaka M, Koshida C, et al. Ignoring non-English-language studies may bias ecological meta-analyses. Ecol Evol. 2020; 10: 6373–6384. https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.6368
  • Zenni, R.D., Barlow, J., Pettorelli, N., Stephens, P., Rader, R., Siqueira, T., Gordon, R., Pinfield, T. and Nuñez, M.A. (2023), Multi-lingual literature searches are needed to unveil global knowledge. J Appl Ecol, 60: 380-383. https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2664.14370
  • Serrano, F. C., Marconi, V., Deinet, S., Puleston, H., Wiederhecker, H. C., Diaz-Ricaurte, J. C., Farhat, C., Luría-Manzano, R., Martins, M., de Souza, E., Marques-Souza, S., dos Santos Vieira-Alencar, J. P., Valdujo, P., Freeman, R., & McRae, L. (2025). Knowledge from non-English-language studies broadens contributions to conservation policy and helps to tackle bias in biodiversity data. Journal of Applied Ecology, 62, 2148–2162. https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2664.70092
  • Amano T, Berdejo-Espinola V, Christie AP, Willott K, Akasaka M, Báldi A, et al. (2021) Tapping into non-English-language science for the conservation of global biodiversity. PLoS Biol 19(10): e3001296. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3001296
  • Amano Tatsuya and Sutherland William J. 2013 Four barriers to the global understanding of biodiversity conservation: wealth, language, geographical location and security Proc. R. Soc. B. 280:20122649 http://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2012.2649
  • Hannah K, Haddaway NR, Fuller RA, Amano T. Language inclusion in ecological systematic reviews and maps: Barriers and perspectives. Res Syn Meth. 2024; 15(3): 466-482. doi:10.1002/jrsm.1699
  • EntoGEM Project (2022) – Grames et al. (Univ. of Nevada, Reno) news release on a global insect data initiative. Emphasizes that a lot of insect data is published outside of English and hence missed in global analyses, underlining the importance of searching literature in multiple languages.

(The above references are provided as context and inspiration, showing how other fields have recognized and addressed the language barrier issue. These examples strengthen the rationale for our proposed review in the insect science domain.)