In a 2010 article aptly entitled “Bibliometrics as weapons of mass citation”, Molinié and Bodenhauden wrote that in the same way “as the ‘value’ of financial products is assessed by irresponsible ranking agencies, the value of scientific research is assessed by ill-conceived parameters such as citation indices, h-factors, and worst of all impact factors of journals” (2010: 78). Although Molinié and Bodenhausen focused on the hard sciences and noted that the social sciences and the humanities may in fact differ, the truth remains that contemporary translation studies (TS) scholars are under pressure to publish in international journals and prestigious book series in order to have access to stable academic positions or to be promoted. It has also produced a paradox: for a discipline that looks at translation in its various forms and language combinations, most of high-ranked periodicals published only in English, even if the language pair involve is, say, Chinese-Korean or Finnish-Swedish.
References
ALLEA
2017The European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity. Berlin: ALLEA.