Counting what counts: Research on community interpreting in German-speaking countries — A scientometric study

This paper presents the results of a study on research on spoken and signed language community interpreting (CI) in German-speaking countries (Austria, Germany, German-speaking regions of Switzerland). A set of different scientometric, network analytical and text linguistic (keyword analysis, title word analysis, co-occurrence analysis) methodological tools is used to investigate this specific field of research. The paper is a follow-up to a first brief introductory paper on that topic (Grbić and Pöllabauer 2006a) and presents an in-depth analysis of the subject. The corpus of the study includes 595 publications on research into spoken and signed CI in German-speaking countries, which were published between 1979 and 2006. It was compiled on the basis of a comprehensive search of the literature. The study focuses, among other aspects, on the types of documents published in that field of research (with a specific focus on journal articles, collective volumes, papers in collective volumes, graduation and doctoral theses) and the nature of the publications, the overall growth rates of publications on that field, the most common languages of publication, the disciplinary affiliation of the authors, the agents (people, institutions) involved in researching CI as well as the networks of authors and co-authorships, and the topics touched upon in research on CI and the most common co-occurrences of topics.