General trends in standardization of scientific terminology in Serbian: a critical analysis of the state of affairs Building the terminology of any scientific area is a long and laborious process. In the recent past, a trend has been noted, and reported by many researchers in the area of Serbian scientific terminology, of importing borrowings of lexical and larger structural units from English into specific scientific registers, rather that to opt for translations, calques, etc. This corresponds closely to the fact that a consensus has been reached among Serbian scientists of various orientations regarding the status of English as the only language of scientific communication in the last several decades. In this paper, an attempt is made to critically evaluate the above outlined trend, from both inherently linguistic and sociolinguistic perspectives. An open-ended multidisciplinary approach, developed by Bugarski (1996a; 1996b) and adapted for the purposes of this paper, is tested against the data coming from various scientific fields, such as computer science, quality control and quality management, linguistics, engineering, etc. The analysis of the data at hand - international terms most of which have not yet been standardized in Serbian - indicate that a hierarchy of criteria for evaluating the terms, which are to be fully accepted in a given scientific register, should be organized in such a way as to give primacy to the parameter measuring the international value of terms, the shortness parameter and the monosemy parameter. In all the instances analyzed herein the English borrowings are given primacy over translation and structural calques in the linguistic code which could be labeled as "modern scientific variety of Serbian".