The Academic Field,knowledge Structure And Theoretical Approach Of Domestic Documentary Research

This paper adopts library and information science tools to describe,review and reflect documentary literature in CSSCI source journals(excluding extensions)from 1998 to 2020.Through literature reading and observation,the documentary research since the 21st century was found to suffer from long-standing deficiencies in a number of areas.Despite being identified in the 1990s,there has yet to be a targeted in-depth discussion,analysis and exploration of them.The criticism of documentary research has been largely neglected since 2012.Through this study,the author argues that researchers who underpin the knowledge map mostly tend to write alone,with only limited dialogue and exchange in the academic arena.But at the meso level of institution,a core academic community is emerging.Although the sample literature has established a fruitful and large knowledge map of documentary studies,its structure has not yet developed a differentiated form with clear boundaries and polycentric nodes,and is highly dependent on practice.The Western discourse and discursive models of literary categories that emerged from documentary criticism in the 1980s have exerted a profound impact on the academic production of documentaries in the last two decades.The introduction of social science theoretical approaches and funding from humanities and social science funds at all levels have further stimulated and guided documentary research.In the Introduction,to ensure the authority,representativeness and legitimacy of the sample,the author took CSSCI as the sample screening standard.Through a brief review of domestic documentary research since the founding of the nation,detailed categories and criteria were designed and constructed for this study.Regarding the selection of research methods,the author critically analyzed the controversies arising from the introduction of knowledge mapping tools such as CiteSpace into humanities and social science research in recent years,as well as the strengths and weaknesses of the tools themselves.Based on this information,the research objectives were developed through content analysis,scient metrics and literature review,that is,combining qualitative and quantitative analyses to examine documentary research since the turn of the century from the perspective of j ournal literature and academic production.In Chapter 1,"Who is Researching:Academic Production of Documentary Research in China in the Spatial Dimension",it mainly adopted author collaboration network analysis,institution collaboration analysis and content analysis to depict the statistics of the number of researchers,the nature of researchers’ institutions and the number of researchers’ papers,so as to identify the distribution of current documentary research subjects.The collaboration and competition in documentary research are as shown in the visualization of other published knowledge maps.Although there is no extensive collaboration yet,three main types of academic production collaborations have developed among research subjects.Most researchers only pay attention to documentaries on the surface,with just over 50 researchers adhering to and developing specific research tendencies and personal styles.Though seeming relatively close,inter-institutional collaboration is subject to the possibility of a North-South school divide due to ideological differences.Industry involvement in academic research has been on the decline,with an imbalance between the discourse of academics and industry.In Chapter 2,"What to Research:Knowledge Structure and Frontier Trends in Documentary Research in the Temporal Dimension",through the functions of keywords such as co-occurrence and clustering,emergent value analysis and centrality analysis,as well as content analysis,it made statistics on the annual number of publications,research orientation,research object and other information of each journal from the perspective of diachronism,and systematically described the sample literature.According to the mapping,the knowledge structure of documentary research is disorganized.However,with the emergence of new topics and research perspectives,documentary research in China has become increasingly standardized.Some journals began publishing documentary research from a social science perspective around 2010.The author provided a brief summary and review of the literature in ten research areas.Moreover,there is a trend in documentary research to loosen the subjectivity of documentary texts.In Chapter 3,"How to Research:Theoretical Sources and Methodological Tools for Domestic Documentary Research",it collected the research methods and funding support through document co-citation and content analysis,and examined the academic production of documentaries from the perspective of research execution.Classical Western film and television theory remains the theoretical source and discourse choice for domestic documentary research.Textual intensive readings and the like remain the most common methods in documentary research,and quantitative methods are applied in a simplistic manner.The support of founding projects at all levels has a significant influence on the direction and quality improvement of documentary research.In the Conclusion,it made a summary based on the hypothesis in the Introduction,examined the defects of the study and their causes,reflected on how this paper can inform the construction of a contemporary documentary theoretical system,and explored the possibility of conducting subsequent research.China’s current documentary industry and academic research are at their peak after the founding of the country.The absence of a systematic,multi-layered theory could lead to the industry once again moving away from the center of the national media stage,as it did earlier this century.Since the 1980s,both the documentary community and the industry have seen tremendous growth,especially the documentary research today.As a vibrant youth,it requires"theories" like values to provide substantial spiritual guidance,implying the necessity and urgency of a prompt reflection and theoretical exploration.