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.
Introduction
Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is a discursive research method that primarily involves examining how the abuse of power, dictates, and injustices related to social power are implemented, reproduced, and counteracted in texts and the discourse within society as well as in political settings (Van Dijk, 2001). The idea can be traced to the concept of “critical linguistics” (Fowler et al., 1979). The attention given to the utilization of language in the study, the alleged “linguistic/turn,” has led to CDA becoming extensively applied (Fairclough, 2001; Janks, 1997). In CDA, the critical tradition derived from sociological studies is introduced into discourse research and critical social analysis is directed at discourse and the connections between discourse and other factors in society (power, identity, ideology, etc.) (Fairclough, 2013). The present CDA scheme was developed by Norman Fairclough, Ruth Wodak, and Teun Van Dijk. CDA is a method of examining the impact of linguistic shifts on both society and cultural trends (Fairclough, 1992). Wodak (2011) proposed the idea that CDA aims to identify “the nontransparent and transparent relations of dominance, discrimination, empowerment, and manipulation displayed within the language.” Van Dijk (1993) stressed that the exercise of power affects perceptions, values, and agendas. The goal of CDA is thus to uncover, expose, and unveil hidden or embedded power structures within a society’s discourse.
A critical approach to discourse, whether it appears under the banner of CDA or CDS (the former is perhaps more concerned with textual analysis, while the latter covers extensive ethnographic methodologies), always involves a broad, interdisciplinary theory, and approach (David, 2018) that stems from a wide range of mutually recurring and overlapping perspectives, often highlighting aspects of linguistic access (Wodak and Meyer, 2009), that is, discourse theories, poststructural feminism, neo-Marxist cultural theory, etc. (Luke, 1997; Rogers et al., 2005).
A variety of state-of-the-art review studies on CDA have been conducted. For example, Rogers and Schaenen (2014) conducted an in-depth analysis of the literature in literacy studies from 2004 to 2012 based on CDA. Qian et al. (2018) combed literature on the employment of CDA in tourism within a broader social context. Tian (2019) drew on Foucault’s discursive formation to examine the discursive practice of CDA throughout its 40 years of development on four levels: objects, enunciative modalities, concepts, and strategies. Miao and Zhao (2019) probed the agenda-setting and evolution of CDA/CDS from the perspective of communications. Xin (2020) reflected on CDA/CDS by drawing attention to two leading journals: Discourse & Society and Critical Discourse Studies. Nevertheless, despite the merits of these publications, they are unable to provide an objective or holistic picture of CDA. Worse still, it is extremely difficult to compile, generalize, and quantitatively evaluate the evolution of a specific domain effectively with traditional reviews amid the availability of numerous research topics. Thus, CDA, an interdisciplinary research approach, should be examined using bibliometrics to yield comprehensive knowledge of the hotspots and evolution of the field.
“Bibliometrics” can include a wide range of scholarly fields representing both the micro and macro viewpoints (Raan and Anthony, 2005). By systematically gathering, profiling, and analyzing CDA-related papers, the author of this study hopes to provide meaningful guidance for scholars with an interest in CDA and pursue opportunities for collaboration with other researchers and institutions. The predictions derived from bibliometric analysis may also offer insights into future CDA studies. As such, the research questions (RQs) below should be considered.
RQ1 will assist scholars in identifying and further focusing on the research trends in CDA.
RQ2 will help scholars examine international cooperation and identify prospective co-authors in the field of CDA studies.
RQ3 will enable the prompt identification of the relevant journals by scholars.
RQ4 will help scholars identify the most prominent documents in the field and help them identify the most productive related authors, nations, and institutions.
RQ5 is expected to foster scholars’ awareness of the hot topics and trends in the research arena.
Data and methodology
Data
The Web of Science (WoS) was employed to acquire a wide range of international scientific literature on CDA. The records extracted from the WoS contain thorough, in-depth documentation in terms of authors, years of publication, institutions, and the journals from which the information originated (complete records and the references cited were saved). The main categories of the search were focused on keywords, headings, and abstracts to find the relevant theories and research in the domain. A total of 8137 valid studies were retrieved using the WoS.
Methodology
Created by Dr. Chao-Mei Chen, CiteSpace, an extensively utilized application, is coded in Java (Chen, 2006; Chen et al., 2010). In this paper, CiteSpace is employed to produce a visual graph of knowledge covering the following variables: nation, organization, author, publication, clustered keywords, and citation bursts. VOSviewer, designed by Van Eck and Waltman (2010), is an easy-to-use graphical instrument depicting a process in which a keyword co-presentation network is introduced to conduct an exhaustive analysis. Among the findings of the bibliometric study, some methods and parameters related to the recognition of knowledge maps are described. Furthermore, each node denotes a project (e.g. countries, institutions, journals, authors, and keywords), whereas a link indicates a cross-reference or co-occurrence of nodes (Chen et al., 2015). The period from 2011 to 2020 was analyzed using the keywords “critical discourse analysis” (CDA) and “critical discourse studies*” (CDS) after a preliminary comparison and evaluation were made. The search criteria and methods are presented in Figure 1.
Steps of bibliometric analysis of CDA.
The merits of such bibliometric methods are discussed below. First, the research results rely on statistical quantitative profiling and solid databases, typically composed of extensive volumes of peer-reviewed articles available in most areas and subjects. Secondly, this visible analysis of the network approach can be utilized to explore the range and classification of academic subjects via the identification of impactful authors and publications as well as key clusters of studies within the ongoing research. These discoveries are crucial for determining hotspots and trends in the direction of research besides yielding in-depth knowledge of new and emerging areas of research. Third, compared to the qualitative approach, this method of research is also more easily applicable to scholarly domains with a huge volume of publications, especially in studies probing relationships among documents.
Results and discussion
Publication output
Identifying the current yearly trends in publishing output is useful for examining the stages of the development, cumulative knowledge, and maturation of CDA. As evidenced in Figure 2, the research regarding CDA shows a growth trend, from 352 studies in 2011 to 1208 in 2020. A possible reason for the field’s prominent growth in 2015 is the increasing attention being directed toward multidisciplinary fields. The publications in the field can be broadly assigned to two phases. The first extended from 2011 to 2014, during which there were a few publications concerning CDA and slow growth, indicating that CDA was in its infancy. The second lasted from 2015 to 2020, during which the number of annual publications related to CDA surged, demonstrating that CDA has been attracting more interest and undergoing more research. The figure for publications in 2020 was 1208, a decrease from the previous year. The underlying cause of the decrease is that the data-collection date for this paper was December 10, 2020; therefore, some publications that should have been included in the 2020 group were not included in the database.
Number of CDA-related publications.
Analysis of countries and institutions
Surveying the distribution of countries is useful for identifying the distribution of articles both spatially and geographically. The network of national collaborations for CDA-related studies is shown in Figure 3a, in which the magnitude of the nodes is represented by the number of articles published in each country. The larger the node, the more publications were recorded. It is noteworthy that the significance of the nodes is reflected by a high degree of centrality. Based on Figure 3a, the centrality progression is as follows: Scotland > Netherlands > Sweden > New Zealand > Australia > Spain > . . . > United States. Scotland has the highest centrality, 1.15, suggesting that it has engaged in extensive collaboration with several countries, including Australia, England, and New Zealand. Figure 3a shows a relatively high level of collaboration among many countries, which may have implications for scholars conducting further research.
Network analysis of countries and institutions in terms of CDA research. (a) Map of countries. (b) Map of institutions.
As shown in Table 1, the United States, the largest country in terms of academic paper output, yielded 1839 articles, followed by England (1388 articles) and Australia (736 articles).
Top 15 countries in terms of CDA research from 2011 to 2020.
As shown in Figure 3b, several institutions are integrated and form institutional clusters. Table 2 lists the top 10 institutions in the arena of CDA-related publications. Significant contributions have been made by universities in several countries, such as Toronto University (113 articles), Lancaster University (98 articles), Sydney University (81 articles), Melbourne University (62 articles), British Columbia University (62 articles), Queensland University (60 articles), and Monash University (57 articles). It was observed that Leeds University, with a centrality of 0.29, and Melbourne University, with a centrality of 0.23, showed high centrality levels, demonstrating their prolific and fruitful contributions to a wide range of articles and deep level of collaboration with other institutions.
Top 10 institutions in terms of CDA-related publications.
Analysis of author cooperation and co-citation networks
Authorship is an essential factor in capturing research capabilities and assessing the evolution of an academic area. It was informative to conduct an in-depth analysis of the geographical distribution of authors and further examine the types of collaboration, that is, whether it was external or internal (Glänzel and Schubert, 2004). The collaborative network of authors was illustrated vividly based on 8137 papers from various authors, as depicted in Figure 4a.
Authors of works related to CDA. (a) Top 10 most productive authors in CDA studies from 2011 to 2020. (b) Top 10 most frequently co-cited authors in CDA studies from 2011 to 2020.
Many authors are inclined to collaborate, often with a small group of co-authors, thereby forming a couple of main communities of authors. Table 3 presents the top 10 most prolific contributors and their institutional affiliations from 2011 to 2020. Based on their output, David Machin appeared to dominate the list of publications. Some other authors with remarkable achievements in terms of publications were Rebecca Rogers, Christopher Hart, Paul Chaney, Ruth Wodak, Debbie Laliberte Rudman, Heiko Motschenbacher, Ysanne Chapman, Eunjung Lee, and Gavin Brookes, all of whom made significant contributions to the advancement of CDA research through their relentless efforts. For example, Machin (2013; Machin and Van Leeuwen, 2016) reimagined how multimodal critical discourse studies (MCDS) could accommodate problems along with topics that are often central to CDS and further proposed the multimodal critical discourse analysis of political discourse, which shifted from its traditional form to privatization. Rogers (Rogers and Schaenen, 2014; Rogers et al., 2016) reviewed the evolution of CDA in the fields of literacy and general education from 2004 to 2012, which significantly broadened the knowledge area associated with CDA and provided helpful references for scholars in the education field. Christopher Hart (2017; Fuoli and Hart, 2018) conducted a refreshing experimental analysis of the fire metaphor of cognitive linguistic critical discourse studies (CL-CDS) and a trust-building mechanism in corporate discourse, which was conducive to the development of experimental studies of CDA. Chaney and Wincott (2014) uncovered how decentralization has produced new policy developments in this space, highlighting the distinct, supplementary function of discourse-based analysis in terms of gaining an appreciation of the modes and procedures of governance best-suited to promoting contemporary welfare. Chaney (2016) also provided an analysis of attempts by the state as well as CSOs to realize the objectives of integrating gender mainstreaming outlined in the UN’s Beijing Declaration. The findings indicated substantial discrepancies between governments’ and social organizations’ respective policy portfolios, problems of procedural clarity, and misaligned state and civil-society preferences regarding critical gender issues.
Top ten most productive authors in CDA studies from 2011 to 2020.
Regarding the co-authorship analysis, each node represents an author in Figure 4b. In the figure, the colors are relative to the year and the lines across the authors indicate collaborations between them (as illustrated in the figure’s legend). Table 4 provides an overview of the top ten most frequently cited authors, in which TA Van Dijk (frequency of 2529; centrality of 0.65) undoubtedly ranks at the top in terms of CDA research, as Van Dijk (2008, 2009a, 2009b, 2014) proposed the sociocognitive approach to discourse analysis, which can account for issues and manifestations that language has failed to address, such as the distinctiveness and generality of speech production and comprehension by various speakers of a language within the same interaction context. Second, Fairclough (1989) (frequency of 1235; centrality of 0.61) advanced such three-dimensional approaches as text-based, discursive, and social practices to analyze various types of discourse and texts. The third most-prominent author is Foucault (1972, 1977, 1981) who introduced such notions as “discourse,” facilitating social science’s development. The fourth is Wodak (2001), who constructed CDA from a discourse-historical perspective. She argued that discourse was not a closed system, but rather an open, “hybrid” one in which a discourse or discourse topic begins with a “field of action” and expands to other types of discourse. In this way, various types of discourse and themes overlap and cross-reference each other in various fields, and, in this context, “intertextuality” refers to the blending of various discursive, behavioral, or genre-related features within a specific discourse. Some other prominent authors are Bourdieu Hall, Butler, Van Leeuwen, Gee, and Halliday.
Top 10 most frequently co-cited authors in CDA studies from 2011 to 2020.
Co-citation journals analysis
To get to know the core journals within a specific domain, one must be concerned with the quantity of literature and citations. The relevant journals are listed in Table 5. Based on the analysis of co-cited journals, a vibrant distribution of frequently cited, high-quality publications in the field of CDA was produced.
Top ten most productive journals in the field of CDA research: 2011–2020.
The analysis shows that Discourse & Society has a larger number of article publications than other journals and plays a critical role in CDA research. The H-index is a key metric for assessing the influence of academic journals. According to the H-index, Organization Studies was shown to be the top journal, with a maximum H-index of 140, proving that it was the most influential journal in the CDA field from 2011 to 2020. A classification by field of the studies indicates that discourse analysis and the social sciences, organization, communication, and politics have attracted the most interest from the top five journals and underscores the growing recognition among scholars of the impact of CDA on education and the media. These journals show higher citation rates and more publications than the others, which indicates that they are among the most highly valued in the study area.
Following the network of co-citation of journals in Figure 5, Critical Discourse Studies, Discourse & Society, the Journal of Language and Politics, and Discourse and Communication appear to be the main journals that publish articles related to CDA/CDS.
Top ten journals in the co-citation journal network of CDA research.
Cited references
Burst detection is an effective analytical instrument for identifying critical events and vital information during a specific interval of time (Huang et al., 2020). Figure 6 displays the most vital references that were identified using VOSviewer from 2011 to 2020.
Visualization map of the co-citation of references in CDA research.
Table 6 lists the first 15 publications in terms of the frequency of references. Analyzing quoted works enhances a researcher’s appreciation of the intrinsic connections among nations, institutions, and authors. The most-quoted reference in CDA studies was the one by Fairclough, “Discourse and Social Change.” Notably, we observed some overlap between the authors of the items shown in Tables 4 and 6. It is noteworthy that the highest-impact authors are often identical to the most-cited ones in terms of production and quotation instances, drawing from publications by Norman Fairclough (1989, 1992, 1995, 2003), Ruth Wodak (2001; Wodak and Meyer, 2009), Teun Van Dijk (1993, 1995, 1997, 1998), Foucault (1972), Fowler (1991), and Van Leeuwen (1999). Their publications are acknowledged as the cornerstone of this research area because of their considerable co-citation rate and tremendous impact. It is worth noting that the most productive authors in Table 3 and the most often-quoted papers in Figure 6 have a finite overlap. To be specific, in Table 3, only Ruth Wodak is ranked among the top 10 most-prolific authors, indicating that he is more than merely a productive author, he was also a highly impactful one from 2011 to 2020. Regarding regional location, it should be highlighted that Norman Fairclough and Ruth Wodak are professors at Lancaster University. The geographical position of these authors demonstrates the leading position of Lancaster University in CDA research.
Top 15 most frequently cited references from 2011 to 2020.
Hotspots and emerging trends
The keywords in the essay mirror the essential aspects of the study area. Thus, research trends and cutting-edge topics can be identified by analyzing the co-occurrence and centrality of keywords (Chen, 2016). Since the search terms used were “critical discourse analysis” and “critical discourse studies,” these terms were set to be invisible in the visualization map. It is apparent that discourse and discourse analysis received a large amount of attention; politics, gender, identity, and education have also been receiving increasing attention. Centrality is an indicator of the impact of a node within a network, and a greater centrality value suggests a higher impact on the development of CDA/CDS as well as the significance of keywords possessing it in linking several other topics of study. Such keywords as “policy,” “gender,” “education,” “power,” and “race” display the highest centrality, followed by “media,” “discourse analysis,” “politics,” “discourse,” “identity.” Consequently, these results represent the most extensively researched topics coupled with their corresponding positive role in linking the field of study with various areas and domains (Table 7).
Top ten keywords based on their frequency.
Keywords are inadequate to capture the vagaries of an academic field because they do not account for the impact of the timeliness of various publications. To eliminate this disadvantage, we conducted a cluster analysis of keywords to highlight emerging study directions and cutting-edge CDA research. The profile of a specific field can be examined via keyword cluster analysis (Duan and Cai, 2016; Kahn, 1997).
The output of CiteSpace using a keyword as the node type is a type of cluster. According to the co-presentation of the keywords analyzed in Figure 7, CiteSpace rendered the information as clusters by utilizing the log-likelihood ratio (LLR) agglomeration calculation, resulting in Figure 8, a depiction of the top seven clusters. Table 8 also provides some specifics of these clusters. The silhouette value tends to be used to evaluate inner homogeneity, or how much more closely an item resembles the other items in its cluster than those in another cluster. As shown in Figure 8, all clusters overlap and share similar characteristics.
Co-occurrence of keywords.
Co-occurrence analysis of keywords; nodes = 286, links = 1190.
Key labels as CDA/CDS research topics.
The label of Cluster #0 relates to “new media,” which is an important means of actively constructing institutional identity, social relations between institutional groups, and those between institutions and the public through discursive practices. The group is recognized as representing the cutting edge and prevailing direction of mainstream research. For example, Santoso et al. (2020), drawing on CDA, primarily examined the connection between social identity-building and populist discourse practices, enriching knowledge of the application of populist discourse to online news. Bingham (2020) presented the application of CDA to a platform of interior dialog for a professional Twitch streamer to reveal the function mode of such a profession.
The themes of Clusters #1 and #3 share similarities. They included more sociological and ideological criticism theories, including those advocating interdisciplinary and multi-perspective discourse studies, with special attention paid to analyzing the intertextuality of discourse; they also showed a recognition of the fact that the connection between language and society does not occur directly but rather involves the intermediate link of the human brain. Thus, they demonstrated an emphasis on the mediating role of cognitive states consisting of intellectual, affective, and memetic links between social structures and individual behavior and discourse. For example, Tang and He (2020) suggested that the changing discourse of illicit drug reporting is governed by changes in society and the national and global context of illicit drugs, mirroring the development of Chinese policy, and community responses to drug-related issues. They uncovered a progressive change by the government from intense ideological alarmism to a citizen-centered, moderate, and health-focused approach. Geertsema and Worthington (2020) presented an analysis of 208 papers to illuminate how discourse constructions are employed predominantly to reaffirm dominant narratives about gender, race, class, and ability, to the extent that they periodically defy these domains.
The labels of clusters #2, #6, and #7 are associated with racism, feminism, and gender. Foucault’s power analysis prompted feminism and racism scholars to reexamine and rethink power relations in a new light. Power is exercised within a network of relations; power relations are relative; power is constantly interrogated, questioned, and resisted in interactions involving power relations; and analyzing women’s and vulnerable groups’ discourse necessarily involves examining the interaction between power relations and the role of resistance and counter-control. Lomotey and Chachu (2020), drawing on themes related to ambivalent sexism and feminist critical discourse analysis, probed gender ideology and discrimination while considering the female and male representatives in Spanish and French proverbs to reveal how essentialist rhetoric can potentially be applied to support the biological gender order and articulated the implications of these notions for a society’s religious order. Borysovych et al. (2020) investigated the representational systems of the statues that were toppled and, thus, were concerned with examining BLM activists’ performances and recording them photographically, offering BLM activists a vehicle for the battle against the legacy of slavery. Trindade (2020) suggested that accounts celebrating Afro hairstyles reflect pertinent strategic orientations that counteract Brazil’s ingrained gender-based racism, aiming to protest the hegemonic Brazilian norm of “whiteness” and communicate a new vision of black aesthetics as a source of legitimate racial identities.
The label of Cluster #4 is related to Foucault’s discourse analysis, which is receiving increasing attention. For example, Ledin and Machin (2020) evaluated the essential principles, from systematic functional grammar to multimodality, and broached the “materiality” of multimodal interaction. Nordin (2020) was informed by discursive institutionalism and utilized the CDA approach to describe how the EU and the Swedish government have recently developed a joint initiative that places a growing emphasis on compulsory education. Gonzaga (2019) explored the suggestions and observations of three OFyCIs for junior secondary education. The accounts of the OFyCIs regarding the obligatory nature of ESB form referential frameworks that contribute to recreating its economic and social benefits.
Cluster 5 is closely related to neoliberalism, which is involved in ideology and power, especially in relation to critical race theory. Carlos (2013) utilized the notion of a renewed common sensibility as a framework of analysis and presented 16 papers in which the effects on various fields of education and policy because of neoliberalism were examined. Choi and Kim (2020) addressed the ways in which the Korean government uses textbooks to advance a sense of social global citizenship within the context of the prevailing neoliberal ideology in the field of education.
Conclusion and implication
Given the undeniable significance of CDA/CDS and the lack of reviews and need for them in CDA/CDS research, we conducted a review of CDA/CDS research using data gathered from the Web of Science. This study has yielded important conclusions that shed critical light on the way forward for the field.
First, research on CDA/CDS generally increased from 2011 to 2020, and it has gained growing attention from younger scholars. The field has a broad scope of research and covers a variety of topics, such as education, linguistics, communication, social issues, and economics and business.
The analysis of cooperation between countries and institutions shows that the United States has played a distinguished role so far. Meanwhile, the UK, Australia, Canada, and Sweden contributed significantly to the field. Toronto University was the most productive institution in this regard. Additionally, it was observed that countries and institutions tended to cooperate often.
Likewise, a close examination of the most prominent authors revealed that many of them prefer to collaborate with a few co-authors, thus forming “co-author clusters.” David Machin was the most productive author in this period, and TA Van Dijk ranked first in terms of co-citations. Furthermore, Discourse & Society had the largest number of publications concerning CDA/CDS in the research area.
Finally, keyword cluster analysis shed light on some emerging directions for research: new media, discourse, racism, feminism, materiality, neoliberalism, and so on. In the 21st century, the emerging social problems are significantly different from those that were the initial concerns of CDA; therefore, new theories and techniques need to be applied in the field. The evolution of CDA is largely reflected in the evolution and implementation of new theories and techniques and in cognitive linguistics, corpus linguistics, and multimodal discourse analysis. The cognitive perspective of critical discourse research is mainly manifested in Chilton’s (2005) critical cognitive linguistics, Van Dijk’s (2009a, 2009b) social cognitive models, Hart’s (2010, 2011) evolutionary psychology, and the cognitive-linguistic perspectives of cognitive pragmatics and the like.
Corpus linguistics provides new approaches and tools for evaluating critical discourse. While CDS is focused on examining naturally occurring discourse (Wodak and Meyer 2016: 2), the analysis of large-corpus data allows for linguistic analysis based on naturally occurring linguistic structures and forms rather than on intuitively perceived linguistic phenomena. Thus, large corpora provide valuable technical support for the regression of real data for discourse analysis. There have been various critical discourse analyses employing corpus-analysis methods, such as racial discourse studies, queer discourse studies, refugee discourse studies, climate change discourse studies, gender discourse studies, and feminist discourse studies. Corpus linguistics has made it possible to conduct a CDA of quantitative and qualitative research on textual data, the problem of subjectivity that tends to arise has essentially been handled, and the credibility of CDA research has been enhanced.
The availability of multiple perspectives is another highlight of CDA. Based on the view that discourse is the physical and symbolic component of social practice, critical discourse analysts extend the scope of discourse to include all social symbolic components, emphasizing the role of various non-verbal symbolic modalities such as sounds, images, auditory elements, and visual aspects in the process of meaning construction (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 1996; O’Toole, 1994). These multimodal forms of symbolic meaning construction provide more options for the concealment of symbolic power and a broader research horizon for CDA. In a world of increasingly widespread use of the “new media” generated by the Internet, the multi-symbolic character of discourse in contemporary society has gained prominence, and multimodal discourse analysis has not only extended the research object from language to other ideational forms but expanded the research horizon of discourse meaning and enriched the research path of CDA.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We would like to extend our thanks to professor Van Dijk and professor Lei Lei for their invaluable comments and suggestions.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.