My English skills are hurting my chances in academic publishing — how can I improve?

The advice

This is a widespread problem. Although science is a global enterprise — and therefore requires diverse, worldwide participation — its use of English as a common language presents a challenge. More than 90% of people globally don’t speak English as a first language, including many scientists.

A 2023 study¹ of 908 environmental scientists reported that, on average, journals are up to 2.6 times more likely to reject papers on the basis of language quality when they come from authors whose first language isn’t English than when they come from peers whose first language is English — and that non-fluent English speakers are asked to revise papers 12.5 times more often.

Another analysis², published in 2025, suggests that scientists who are women, particularly those from low-income countries, are most affected by language barriers. Women from low-income countries whose first language is not English publish substantially fewer English-language papers than their male counterparts from higher-income countries whose first language is English.

Breaking language barriers: ‘Not being fluent in English is often viewed as being an inferior scientist’

Few journals, universities or grant programmes foot the bill for editing or translation services, leaving many scientists for whom English isn’t a main language to fend for themselves. Nature’s careers team spoke to researchers who focus on language inclusivity in science and sought their advice on how researchers from diverse backgrounds can improve their chances of success in scientific publishing.

Choosing inclusive journals

Some journals have taken steps to make the publication process easier for non-fluent English speakers — and there are some ways to spot such outlets, says evolutionary biologist Henry Arenas-Castro at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. In a 2024 study of 736 biological sciences journals, Arenas-Castro and his colleagues found that non-profit journals owned by scientific societies are the most likely to have inclusive language policies³. Such policies include allowing citations of non-English papers and supplementary materials in languages other than English, as well as publishing papers in different languages.

Meanwhile, some journals, such as those belonging to the British Ecological Society, offer AI editing tools to authors free of charge. And some, such as Nature and The Journal of Pediatrics, state in their author guidelines that papers typically won’t be rejected because of the perceived quality of English, which helps to “signal that those journals are maybe more inclusive and offer a better experience”, Arenas-Castro says. (Nature’s careers section is editorially independent of Nature’s publisher, Springer Nature.)

It also helps when journal policies explicitly instruct peer reviewers to focus their criticism on the scientific merit of a paper. For instance, the publisher MDPI cautions reviewers against focusing on spelling or English-language errors, and Cell Press journals ask reviewers to refrain from commenting on the authors’ presumed language skills. If authors nevertheless receive language-nitpicking comments from reviewers, they can politely remind their handling editors of the journal’s policy, suggests Valeria Ramírez Castañeda, a biologist at Stanford University in California who has studied language barriers in science.

For journals for which language-inclusivity policies are unclear or lacking, Arenas-Castro recommends that authors contact the editor-in-chief before submitting their manuscript, to get extra clarification or concessions. In his experience, “author guidelines are a poor reflection of how inclusive their editors could be”.

Mentoring programmes and courses

Notably, some journals — such as the Journal of Mammalogy and Evolution — offer programmes that pair authors with editors or English-proficient volunteers from their associated societies to read manuscripts and suggest ways to improve clarity when necessary.

How I learnt to write research papers as a non-native English speaker

However, such programmes are rare and don’t always have capacity to meet the demand, notes evolutionary ecologist Andrew McAdam at the University of Colorado Boulder. He helped to create an online platform called Peer Edits that enables authors to solicit feedback on their manuscripts from early-career volunteers working in the same field. Another online resource, Rising Scholars, which provides support for scientists based in low- and middle-income countries, also offers free workshops and mentoring programmes for scientific writing.