The Arab Political Science Network (APSN), organized a roundtable discussion titled: Engaging Arabic Scholarly Works: Challenges and Opportunities. The session took place at the Middle East Studies Association Annual Meeting in Denver, Colorado, on December 2 from 9:30 to 10:30 am.

The internationalization of research and knowledge production in the last two decades is yet to be transformed into an interconnected network across different regions of the world. Despite recent strides in higher education in the Arab world, knowledge production continues to suffer from weak institutionalization and fragmentation. Research practices remain plagued by limited funding opportunities, methodological rigor, access to resources and relevance to ongoing local and global debates.

Most Arabic academic work, journal articles and books, are limited in their circulation, accessibility, and rigorous review and lack reliable metrics to measure their influence and impact. This creates challenges in engaging with these outputs and their authors and leads to their original contributions going unnoticed. It also disincentivizes Arabic- speaking scholars outside the Arab world, from publishing in Arabic.

The roundtable brought together three scholars working on the Arab world to reflect on and discuss the challenges and opportunities of engaging Arabic academic outputs. Each of the three participants had up to 10 minutes to share their own experiences and suggest potential areas for increasing accessibility, rigor and measuring impact.