Multilingual publication practices in the social sciences and humanities at a Polish university: choices and pressures

Sharing research results internationally has become a hallmark of modern science. In many countries, scholars are expected to publish in journals that promise high citation scores, boosting the recognition of the authors and institutions they represent. Since most of such indexed journals are English-medium, these expectations influence the choice of the publication language, a problem particularly relevant in the social sciences and humanities (SSH), where research is often embedded in specific cultural contexts. This paper presents the results of a study on multilingual publication practices among SSH scholars at the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland. It looks into the present and future language choices, reasons for these decisions, and the role of science policy in shaping the linguistic landscape of the SSH disciplines. The analysis is based on data collected in a survey and retrieved from the university publication reports for the evaluation period 2017-2021. The results demonstrate the dominant position of Polish and a strong and growing position of English, with a small share of publications in other languages. The findings point to the role of evaluation schemes in decisions regarding the publication language and the need for a science policy that fosters multilingual research practices.