The hot spots and frontiers of research on the Grand Canal Culture Belt in China: Literature and academic trends

Abstract The construction of the grand canal cultural belt is the first zonal development strategy in China starting from the Spring and Autumn Periods. In recent years, it performs the link between the oceangoing Maritime Silk Road and the land-based Silk Road to promote a national policy of “One Belt and One Road”. In order to fully understand global academic hot spots and the corresponding trajectory in the research of the grand canal culture belt from 1976 to 2022, the literature review is based on 256 publications from ISI Web of Science, 4944 bibliographic records retrieved from China Academic Journals Full-Text Database, 472 articles under the theme of the cultural economy from Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index, and visualized by the scientometric software of CiteSpace. Meanwhile, comparisons of research areas with canal studies in both China and other global famous canals are implemented, including the Grand Canal of China, the Venice Canal of Italy, the Panama Canal of Panama, the Colorado River of the USA, the Nile Delta of Egypt, Nicaragua Canal of USA, Welland Canal of Canada, especially four canal studies cases on keywords and knowledge clusters: Grand Canal of China, Venice Canal of Italy, Nile Delta of Egypt, Rhine-Marne Canal of France. The study identifies major intellectual cooperation networks, cooccurrence keywords, research clusters, and landmark articles, including: (1) International grand canal research tendencies gradually extend the discussions from water conservancy to the cultural economy since Chinese scholars publish more articles on grand canal cultural belt, especially from the year of 2016; (2) Government-issued culture development planning and high diversity of grand canal culture belt are two crucial driven factors affecting the changes in the theme of Chinese studies. Finally, this study summarizes the future research directions that could be expanded in two ways: (1) Increase the multidisciplinary perspective of research and strengthen the cooperation of researchers and (2) Transfer the theoretical research results into canal heritage protection and development practice to fully develop the value of canal