There are over 150 specialized journals in Translation Studies (TS) throughout the world. The amount of publications (books, chapters in edited books, journal articles, Ph.D’s…) in our interdiscipline clearly exceeds 50,000 items, with over 40,000 issued in the last 20 years. Paradoxically, TS journals and books and doctoral theses are mostly invisible in the international academy and assessment framework.
Perhaps the time has come to look back and around us in order to gauge what the TS community has been doing in these last, feverish, 20-30 years, and to establish an informed state of the art. TS as any other established academic discipline has enough critical mass to lend itself to analysis from a bibliometric perspective. We believe it is high time for TS to promote quantitative and qualitative bibliometric studies.
This Special issue of Perspectives will look at TS research, as an established discipline which branches out to other near fields, giving raise to multidisciplinary collaborations. It will provide the opportunity to raise awareness and map the TS academic community. It is hoped that collaborations will compile and analyse data from different and complementary perspectives. Only then will we be really aware of where the field stands, allowing for comparisons with other fields, and perhaps be able to develop a useful tool to demand similar recognition to our field from other disciplines with a longer academic tradition --which seem to enjoy more respect and, hence, better ratings for their production.
The Special issue of Perspectives makes a call for papers asking for studies attempting to answer questions such as the following:
- TS Bibliographies and what they tell us about ourselves
- How and with what aims holistic and specialized bibliographies of TS should be made?
- What are or have been the main research trends or objects of study in Translation Studies?
- What role is multidisciplinary research playing in the development of the discipline?
- Has there been any change of trend in the last few years regarding the predominant channel of communication in the dissemination of research results in TS?
- Bibliometric issues
II.1 Current situation - How are TS publications currently measured?
- How is impact of publications measured in TS?
- Which are the citing practices within TS?
- Does it make sense in TS to consider journal articles as the most important piece of research, as in other disciplines?
- Which research centers and/or countries have a greater presence in the high ranking journals?
- Which is the role and presence of TS e-journals in the development of the discipline?
- To what extent is research in our interdiscipline carried out by team work and acknowledged as such?
- Which languages are used to disseminate research results within our discipline?
- Can research in minority languages or local subjects be of international impact?
- How do different academic authorities apply assessment criteria?
II.2 Claims for the future - How should TS publications be measured?
- Should impact be measured differently?
- Is impact equatable to quality? If not, is there any reasonable and shareable way to measure quality in TS research?
- Should English be promoted as the lingua franca in TS in order to enhance the visibility of TS research?
- Should TS publications be assessed always at least partly by TS scholars?
- How should qualitative studies complement quantitative ones in TS bibliometrics?
Please send your proposals to http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/mm-pst
Deadline for finished articles: 1 June 2014
