  Contemporary scientific exchanges are international, yet language continues
to be a persistent barrier to scientific communication, particularly for
non-native English-speaking scholars. Since the ability to absorb knowledge has
a strong impact on how researchers create new scientific knowledge, a
comprehensive access to and understanding of both domestic and international
scientific publications is essential for scientific performance. This study
explores the effect of absorbed knowledge on research impact by analyzing the
relationship between the language diversity of cited references and the number
of citations received by the citing paper. Chinese social sciences are taken as
the research object, and the data, 950,302 papers published between 1998 and
2013 with 8,151,327 cited references, were collected from the Chinese Social
Sciences Citation Index. Results show that there is a stark increase in the
consumption of foreign language material within the Chinese social science
community, and English material accounts for the vast majority of this
consumption. Papers with foreign language references receive significantly more
citations than those without, and the citation advantage of these
internationalized work holds when we control for characteristics of the citing
papers. However, the citation advantage has decreased from 1998 to 2008,
largely as an artifact of the increased number of papers citing foreign
language material. After 2008, the decline of the citation advantage subsided
and became relatively stable, which suggests that incorporating foreign
language literature continues to increase scientific impact, even as the
scientific community itself becomes increasingly international. However,
internationalization is not without concerns: the work closes with a discussion
of the benefits and potential problems of the lack of linguistic diversity in
scientific communication.
