Translated articles in the CrossRef database

CrossRef is an organization of scientific publishers that manages the Digital Object Identifiers given to scientific articles. As a consequence they have a large database with scientific works, some of which are or have translations. The CrossRef database has an API from which we can request the records of works that are (filter=relation.type:is-translation-of) or have (filter=relation.type:has-translation) translations. The code we used to download and analyse the data to get the results below can be found on our Codeberg GIT repository.

Results

CrossRef currently knows 4142 translations, while only 2152 articles have a translation. This makes sense as translated articles are often translated into many languages, although it could have been different as these translations quite commonly do not have a DOI, but are only linked to with a URL.

https://blog.translatescience.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/histogram_isTranslation.png

Discussion

Likely many journals also have translations for other/earlier years. As it is a limited set of publishers and journals, we could contact them.

(especially the Russian ones with entries for 2021)

the main difference is the year 2021, where we have many Russian journals published translations.

       *

       * The publisher with most translations is https://www.pleiades.online/, which is a publisher that specializes on translating Russian articles into English.

   * Looks like publishers add translations together when the original is published, but to not go back into their catalogs to add older translations. For example, Pleiades Publishing states it is an international group of companies founded in 1971. But we only have recent translations, while translations are their main focus.

   * It looks suspicious that the first year (2008) with translations is so recent and has so many translations. But it seems to be okay, They are all publications in e-Anatomy by the publisher IMAIOS, which publishes an anatomical atlas. https://www.imaios.com/en/e-Anatomy

   * Many translations have a URI, not a DOI. Especially when you look at the number of translations (rather than the number of translated works). The ones with an URI tend to have multiple translations. Information on these translations (language, title, translator, ...) will have to be scrapped. Example:

> id-type                                  id asserted-by

> uri https://www.imaios.com/es/e-Anatomy     subject

> uri https://www.imaios.com/de/e-Anatomy     subject

> uri https://www.imaios.com/fr/e-Anatomy     subject

> uri https://www.imaios.com/br/e-Anatomy     subject

> uri https://www.imaios.com/cn/e-Anatomy     subject

> uri https://www.imaios.com/jp/e-Anatomy     subject

> uri https://www.imaios.com/ru/e-Anatomy     subject

> uri https://www.imaios.com/pl/e-Anatomy     subject