Bibliometrics Analysis of Research Literature on Chinese National Parks

Whether China can break the existing predicament and establish a national park system with Chinese characteristics is a proposition that Chinese researchers have been closely followed. Over the past two decades, scholars have conducted a great deal of discussions and analysis on the experience of foreign national park development and the exploration of ways for constructing national parks in our country. However, there are divergent opinions and controversies among them. No consensus has been reached on the core issues for establishing a national park system. By using bibliometrics analysis, along with Price Law and Bradford’s law, this study systematically reviews 1,695 references concerning national parks, as well as chronologies, literature sources, keywords, core authors, funding and case sites. The results show that under the Chinese context, the main progresses in the research of China’s national parks include: The existing research has undergone three stages of development and entered the stage of exploration with Chinese characteristics. The exploration of landscape architecture has a long history and has become a new hot topic in multidisciplinary research over the past five years. They focus on foreign experience and domestic practice summary, tapping issues gradually in depth. Meanwhile, the main problems include: the core author group has not yet formed, the degree of co-operation of literature remains low, and it is lack of scientific and quantitative research methods; the spatial distribution of targeted research is unbalanced, the research on demand side is lacking. It is suggested that further study should be carried out on core issues concerning the establishment of a national park system in the future.