Geographical Contributions and Prospects of Chinese Heritage Studies in the Past 30 Years

In the past 30 years, the study of Chinese heritage at home and abroad has gradually increased. Influenced by Western heritage research, Chinese heritage research has been developed and conducted independently, forming a huge interdisciplinary heritage research system with unique Chinese academic characteristics. Among them, architecture has led to the evaluation, repair, and activation of heritage material carriers. Sociology has focused on the excavation and construction of heritage history and cultural value. Archaeology has continued to promote heritage archaeology and interpretation. Geography, with its comprehensive vision, has made abundant achievements and become increasingly important, but its research context is rather vague. Therefore, to clarify the specific geographical contribution in the field of heritage research, this study, based on CNKI, CSSCI, WOS, and other databases, uses the knowledge graph tool to sort 1, 172 geographical papers from 1990 to 2020. The contributions of this study are as follows: The first concerns obvious stage characteristics. The number of studies has increased rapidly since 2005, peaking thrice in the last decade. The number of articles presented a "zigzag" type development trend, and keywords showed olive type development characteristics. The research has experienced the initial stage of "World Heritage" (1990-2004), the multi-exploration stage of "intangible cultural Heritage", "agricultural heritage" and many other topics (2005-2012), and the in-depth research stage focusing on practice and theory (2013-2020). Second, the cooperation network of scholars presents a "small agglomeration and large dispersion" pattern. This includes a large number of independent scholars, small coauthors scattered sporadically, and a closely linked aggregation group in which the core authors have a high primacy ratio. Third, cultural heritage research is the largest in quantity. The content involves agricultural cultural heritage, intangible cultural heritage, world heritage, and other sections. Agricultural heritage research is at the forefront of the international and becomes hotspots in geographical heritage research, with the literature focusing on the impact of ecologically sustainable environmental change and tourism development and utilization, and gradually expanding its scope to include the origin of the evolution of agricultural, landscape, economic and cultural value research. Based on the analysis of 198 papers with a high citation rate, this study shows the geographical research characteristics of emphasizing the orientation of reality and practice, focusing on the relationship between subject and object, and attaching importance to spatial analysis. In the future, geography should make more contributions to consolidate the leading position of agricultural heritage research, promote theoretical output, build the heritage research academic community, and expand the multi-perspective of heritage research.