In recent years, SIS has integrated teaching with academic research, and has expanded its research areas. Research in the disciplines taught in SIS is gaining momentum, particularly in key areas such as linguistics (including applied linguistics), foreign literature studies, translation studies and cross-cultural studies.

As a result, SIS has made impressive achievements both in terms of quantity and quality of its research. For instance, the School won a major MOE project in Humanities and Social Sciences Research and hosted three National Social Sciences Planning Fund key projects. In the past three years, SIS researchers have begun 32 research projects at provincial and ministry levels; have published 132 monographs, translations and textbooks; have published 250 papers in core journals and above; and have won 13 prizes of or above provincial or ministry level for research achievements. In 2017 alone, 10 National Social Sciences Foundation projects, including three key projects, were approved. Per-person paper publication was one the highest in the country. For four consecutive years (2014-2017), Prof. LIU Haitao was the only Elsevier highly-cited scholar of humanities in ZJU; three of his or his team’s papers team were among the top 1% cited papers. Prof. WU Yicheng, one of the most productive scholars of linguistics domestically, published monographs and scores of papers in internationally-known journals. In addition, academic exchanges are being staged frequently, including high-quality academic presentations, international and national academic conferences, workshops and international exchange visits. A great number of research projects have won national and international research awards.

Professors XU Jun, HE Lianzhen, NIE Zhenzhao, LIU Haitao, WU Yicheng, CHENG Gong, CHENG Le, and JIANG Jingyang among others are all editors of major international and domestic journals. SIS is home to three international journals, namely the International Journal of Legal Discourse with Prof. CHENG Le as editor-in-chief, and Interdisciplinary Studies of Literature and Forum for World Literature Studies, for both of which Prof. NIE Zhenzhao is editor-in-chief.