Who’s who and what’s what in Translation Studies

This paper introduces the relevance of bibliometric studies in TS. It then discusses impact factors and describes a new bibliometric project within TS and its particular approach, rather different from the usual one in international academic circles. It also tries to establish the possibilities and limitations (very especially the need not to confuse impact and quality) of the notion of impact. Then, it analyses the overall patterns emerging from the nature of a preliminary list of the 51 most cited works in our discipline as extracted from BITRA (http://dti.ua.es/en/bitra/introduction.html) mainly in terms of chronology, authors, types of publications, subgenres and approaches — in order to obtain a reliable and “peer-reviewed” picture of the main interests in TS. These patterns largely confirm those found in previous citation analyses, and as data collection and mining advance, BITRA could be an excellent tool for autonomous, reliable TS-internal assessments.