Abstract:

Education law studies is an emerging crossdiscipline subject in China. Since the reform and opening, China's education law studies has made great progress and played an increasingly prominent role in pedagogy and law studies. Meanwhile, the research of education law studies has made great achievements, and qualitative research methods are used to review and summarize the development of China’s education law. But in general, the study of education law still lacks a systematic quantitative analysis. For example, a textual description is subject to the influence of personal subjective experience, thus leading to improper classification and summary, which makes it difficult to dig out the dynamic relationship between research themes. Based on 1409 papers of CNKI database from 1985 to 2015, this study, using Bicomb and Spss, attempts to analyze the coword visualization of research focus in China’s education law studies through knowledge mapping. It identifies highfrequency keywords, creates a coword matrix of highfrequency keywords and conducts a cluster analysis and multidimensional scaling. The results show that the research focus of education law studies involves six fields: the legal status of higher learning institutions and legal relationship and legal remedy, the autonomy of higher learning institutions, education by law and the system of education law, education of the legal institution among university students and their legal consciousness, student injury accidents and legal obligations, and right to compulsory education. In addition, our study shows the general trend of researches on legal education (ten more and ten less) in the past 30 years. There have been more qualitative researches but less innovative methods; more researches on substantive laws but less on procedural laws; more on education legal affairs but less on education jurisprudence; more on statute but less on act; more generalized but less disciplinary perspective; more single discipline researches but less interdisciplinary researches; more on legal systems but less rule of law; more on legal text elaboration but less on legal creation; more macro researches but less microscopic; more administrative researches but less on internal corporate governance. Therefore, more research work needs to be done in the procedural law, education jurisprudence, education legal case, discipline vision, rule by education law and so on, so as to enrich the research areas of education law and highlight the relatively independent discipline status of education law.

Key words: education law, research focus, coword visualization, knowledge mapping