The research characteristics of China and South Korea FTA in Chinese academic circle -- Visual analysis based on CiteSpace

Abstract

China and South Korea jointly agreed to start the research of Free Trade Agreement(FTA) in 2004, and officially signed the China · Korea FTA in 2015 which promoted entering a new era of free trade between the two countries. Meanwhile, scholars of the two countries have paid attention through the whole process, from joint research, signing of the agreement, taking effects to current second phase of free trade negotiation. Scholars’ academic research on China · Korea FTA has played an important guiding role in promoting the long-term economic and trade development, and in deepening free trade between the two countries. This paper, based on the database of CNKI and CiteSpace 5.1.r8 SE statistics software, conducted a statistical study of relevant literature of China · Korea FTA from 2001 to 2018, and operated a visualization to analyse its research characteristics. The study found that most of relevant domestic research institutions are located in the coastal and Northeast China, which are scattered and lack of interaction, and have a low degree of participation in international cooperation. Chinese academic community has not formed core scholars with high output and lack of long-term cooperative research teams. Chinese academic research’s key words are such as ‘free trade zone’, ‘agricultural products’, ‘regional economic integration’, ‘China, Japan and South Korea’, etc; The academic research has gone through four stages: exploratory stage —development stage —flourishing stage --later stage. These research outputs have different characteristics in each stage, and their development trajectories are basically synchronized with the development process of China · Korea FTA.