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Ten Years of China’s Belt and Road Initiative: A Bibliometric Review

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Abstract

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is poised to profoundly reshape the regional geographical landscape. While existing communication studies on BRI have focused on the official and media narratives to frame the initiative, the overall orientation of the topic in academic circles is not well understood. By conducting a bibliometric literature review, this paper addresses this gap by answering the research question: How is the BRI reflected in the academic literature? In the review, we divide all academic studies on BRI into four cohorts (studies from scholars based in China, in Quad countries, in the rest of the world, and cross-collaborating scholars) and use structural topic model to understand the themes and trends on BRI scholarship from scholars from these regions. Our results show that scholars in different cohorts understand BRI differently, specifically, with China-based scholars projecting ideas of development, growth and sustainability, while Quad-based scholars mostly focus on the geopolitical impact, security implications and debt sustainability of BRI. The findings also show a divergence between popular narratives on BRI and academic research on the topic.

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Data Availability

The data used in this paper is publicly available in the Scopus database.

Notes

  1. These included words identifying publishers, research specific terms (such as paper, journal, findings, and methodology), journal specific terms (such as special issue or editorial), and stop words (such as will, thus, and still) not identified by the dictionary of stop words.

  2. Two minor caveats need to be highlighted here. First, it should be noted that over 50% of the BRI papers either receive no funding or fail to disclose their funding information. Second, the provided funding information of some articles seems to be incomplete or inconsistent. Nevertheless, the results provide an indication of the clear role of Chinese governments and universities in funding BRI research.

  3. It should be noted that the stm package does not produce topic labels. The topics have been labeled based on authors’ own interpretation of the highly associated words of the respective topics.

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  1. Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    Shaleen Khanal

  2. S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore

    Hongzhou Zhang

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Khanal, S., Zhang, H. Ten Years of China’s Belt and Road Initiative: A Bibliometric Review. J OF CHIN POLIT SCI (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11366-023-09873-z

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