Research Progress of Crime Geography Studies in China

Abstract

Over the past 30 years, crime geography in China has set out, as the demand for crime prevention increased very rapidly. In order to get an objective and comprehensive understanding of the research development in China, a statistical analysis on crime geography studies was conducted. Taking periodical papers selected from Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure(CNKI), WANFANG DATA, and VIP Database as samples, we retrospect the changes of contents and researchers on crime geography during three periods: 1986~1990, 1991~2000,and 2001~2010. The results show that periodical papers, research organizations and related researchers have expanded greatly in number since mid-1980s, indicating a promising tendency. Core authors, who can motivate more researchers, have emerged in four main research aspects of crime geography: urban crime geography,PGIS, CPTED, and Situational Crime Prevention. In 21stcentury, both new opportunities and challenges come out for crime geography. While more and more mathematical models are employed, the percentage of quantitative researches has declined significantly. It is also the same for case studies. What's more, the study areas constricts to Yangtze River Delta, Beijing-Tianjin region, and Pearl River Delta. With emerging research groups and declining share of core authors, crime geography in China has entered a phase of reorganization. In the future, much more efforts will be needed for the further development of crime geography. We should not only try to synthesize multiple theories and conduct more case studies in the Chinese context, but also pay attention to the unification of research norms and cultivation of next-generation core authors.