The ever-changing face of Chinese Interpreting Studies: A social network analysis

Ziyun Xu
Wake Forest University

As the discipline of Translation and Interpreting Studies (TIS) has continued to expand rapidly over the past twenty years, scientometric research has been applied increasingly often to analyse its trends and patterns. Drawing inspiration from Social Network Analysis (SNA), this study aims to quantify academic research impact and identify patterns of influence at an institutional level in Chinese Interpreting Studies (CIS), by seeking answers to the following questions: Which are the most influential publications? Which institutions carry the most weight? How have their respective levels of influence evolved over time? By analysing a near-exhaustive corpus of 59,303 citations from CIS literature, the study reveals that the majority of influential publications are monographs and theoretical in nature, though many Chinese textbooks on interpreting are also highly influential. It also finds that an institution’s ranking in research productivity does not necessarily translate into high academic influence.

Table of contents

The genesis of scientometric research, which relies on the use of quantitative methods for analysing scientific communication, can be traced back to the 1960s (Garfield 1979). Though it was originally used by librarians facing limited shelf space and an ever-widening pool of scientific literature for the purposes of identifying which reference materials should take priority (Archambault and Lariviere 2007), it has gradually developed into a discipline in its own right. With the burgeoning of scientific research in the latter half of the 20th century, it became increasingly necessary to introduce criteria that could help determine which research fields or projects should be funded: scientometrics began to play an influential role in this decision-making process. It was even claimed that it could lead to efficiency gains in research funding (Beck 1978).

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