Questionnaire on the status of internationalization at major medical academic societies in Japan

With the internationalization of clinical and medical research field, English has become an important tool even for domestic academic conferences. In order to understand the current status of internationalization of each academic society, we conducted a questionnaire survey on English usage at annual academic meetings. We asked for answering the questionnaire to major domestic medical academic societies (149 societies), and received responses from 109 of them. English presentations were given at 87 societies for symposium, 64 societies for educational lecture, 71 societies for general oral presentation, and 72 societies for poster presentation. The English notation of the printed matter were given in 77 societies for abstract booklet, 41 societies for leaflet, and 56 societies for website. On the other hand, there were some fields such as psychosomatic medicine where understanding in their native language would be necessary, and it would be important to recognize that there are diversity in internationalization among academic societies.