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

Intercultural Studies Group, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Spain
DOI
10.7287/peerj.preprints.945v1
Subject Areas
Data Science, Databases, Digital Libraries, Social Computing
Keywords
Social Network Analysis, scientometrics, Chinese Interpreting Studies
Copyright
© 2015 Xu
Licence
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
Cite this article
Xu Z. 2015. The ever-changing face of Chinese Interpreting Studies: a social network analysis. PeerJ PrePrints 3:e945v1

Abstract

As the discipline of Translation and Interpreting Studies (TIS) has continued to expand rapidly over the past twenty years, scientometric research has been increasingly applied to analyze its trends and patterns. Drawing inspiration from Social Network Analysis, this study aims to quantify academic research impact and identify patterns of influence at an institutional and regional level in Chinese Interpreting Studies (CIS), by seeking answers to the following questions: Which are the most influential publications? Which institutions and regions carry the most weight? How have their respective levels of influence evolved over time? By analyzing a near-exhaustive corpus of 59,303 citations from CIS literature, the study reveals that most of the 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, and geographical proximity does not determine whether neighboring regions belong to the same research community.

Author Comment

This is a submission to Target for review.