Doctoral dissertations in Chinese Interpreting Studies: A scientometric survey using topic modeling

Despite being a relatively new discipline, Chinese Interpreting Studies (CIS) has witnessed tremendous growth in the number of publications and diversity of topics investigated over the past two decades. The number of doctoral dissertations produced has also increased rapidly since the late 1990s. As CIS continues to mature, it is important to evaluate its dominant topics, trends and institutions, as well as the career development of PhD graduates in the subject. In addition to traditional scientometric techniques, this study’s empirical objectivity is heightened by its use of Probabilistic Topic Modeling (PTM), which uses Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to analyze the topics covered in a near-exhaustive corpus of CIS dissertations. The analysis reveals that the topics of allocation of cognitive resources, deverbalization, and modeling the interpreting process attracted most attention from doctoral researchers. Additional analyses were used to track the research productivity of institutions and the career trajectories of PhD holders: one school was found to stand out, accounting for more than half of the total dissertations produced, and a PhD in CIS was found to be a highly useful asset for new professional interpreters.