A bibliometric analysis of critical discourse analysis and its implications

Abstract

As critical discourse analysis/studies move into the second decade of the 21st century, there is a need to reflect on their evolution and envision their future development. In this paper, CiteSpace and VOSviewer are employed to gain holistic insights into CDA/CDS research and capture the recent research foci. The Web of Science core collection database is a prominent resource for collecting data. It was found that (1) CDA has broadly absorbed the theories of other disciplines and increasingly developed into a super-discipline; (2) corpus building, the advent of computer technology, and the development of linguistic analysis software have provided effective analytical tools for critical discourse research, making it possible for overall and partial analyses to complement each other and for complementary qualitative and quantitative approaches to be used to enhance the thoroughness and precision of research; and (3) the research methods for conducting CDA tend to be diverse and comprehensive.