A contrastive analysis of the main benchmarking tools for research assessment in translation and interpreting: The Spanish approach

Research assessment has become one of the most taxing exercises that scholars have to endure on a regular basis. Publications seem to be the currency used nowadays for everything from getting funds for a PhD, to access to an academic post and indeed promotion. Research assessment results are also of key importance in university departments, as funding and resources are increasingly linked to research results. In the Department of Translation and Interpreting at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona a pro-active policy has been adopted with the aim of increasing results from research activities at all levels. Within this context we gathered a list of T&I (Translation and Interpreting) journals and joined efforts with our colleagues in the Library of Humanities of our university, to include information about where these journals are indexed. Based on the collected data about T&I journals along with the existing assessment requirements made public by the various Catalan and Spanish quality agencies, we have analysed the objective parameters taken into consideration when evaluating research. When writing this article we had three main objectives: first, to gain a deeper understanding of the current research practices concerning publications within T&I; second, to carry out a bottom-up analysis and offer concrete data concerning average number of pages, average number of authors per article, author ordering and research output format and performance of scholars affiliated to Spanish universities in terms of high-impact contributions. Finally, we wanted to reflect upon the real-life application of the common assessment criteria. © 2011 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.