Chinese Garden Research in the 21st Century International Academia —A Diachronic Analysis of Journal Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes and Dumbarton Oaks Library and Collection

In response to increasing attention from international academia on Chinese gardens, this article advances China’s landscape studies by exploring international research trends on Chinese gardens during the 21st century. It mainly adopts a diachronic perspective to examine the journal Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes—a leading journal, and Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection (Trustees for Harvard University)—international academia’s leading institution on landscape studies. Using a bibliometric approach, it first carries out a statistical analysis of the rules and trends of development to explore the distribution patterns of Chinese gardens. Based on this analysis, it uses time series analysis to study the relationships of related academic discourses and contexts. The study reveals that Chinese garden studies led by Chinese scholars has attracted increasing attention from international academia and has involved growing numbers of scholars from various disciplines. Consequently, it has not only shaped much of the output from China and Britain, but is also driving a paradigm shift away from studying Chinese classical gardens to modern designed landscapes, drawing upon a monolithic approach to investigate the pluralistic, and from focusing on Chinese national interaction to transnational interaction.