Japanese national university faculty publication: A time trend analysis

Abstract The dominance of English in academic discourses is well established, with increased English publication used to evidence its increasing use at the expense of national language publication. However, while English publication frequency has increased over time, few studies have examined how university faculties outside higher education’s Anglophone center have changed their language of publication frequency. Thus, in this investigation, we analyzed a Japanese national university’s medical faculty’s overall frequency of publication along with publication frequency by language medium, expanding on an earlier diachronic analysis of university publication reports. We previously found English language publications largely replaced Japanese language publications for journal articles and that overall publication frequency dramatically increased. However, that initial diachronic analysis did not show when those changes manifested. The current investigation explores this through a decennial time trend historical document analysis of publication reports from 1979 to 2020. This analysis elucidates how publication frequency, type, and language medium have changed. Specifically, we find that the largest change in the overall frequency of publication is between 1989–1990 and 1999–2000. These changes are primarily driven by conference papers and other publications, publication types not typically examined in analyses of journal citation databases. Our findings establish a foundation to discuss potential causes of the trends we identify in this Japanese national university’s medical faculty’s publications.