Review of research on knowledge domains in university governance: Mapping literature in English and Chinese

In the context of globalisation, public organisations are undergoing rapid transformation, and how to govern them scientifically has become an important research topic. University governance is an important research area in the field of higher education; it has been addressed by many scholars across the world. In order to fully understand the current status of research in this field, this article reviews and analyses data on university governance literature in the Web of Science and the China National Knowledge Infrastructure database by journals, time of publication, as well as country and institution of publication. In our analysis, hot topics in research and frontiers of research were identified using the visualisation software CiteSpaceV. This article analyses the state of research in the field of university governance from multiple perspectives; notably, by comparing Chinese and English language literature. This allows us to explore the background and reasons for differences between Chinese and English language literature on university governance. Also, the current research status and development trends as documented in Chinese and English research databases are summarised. Our findings contribute to the field of research on university governance by identifying influential research journals and institutions, as well as research hotspots in different periods and different research directions in this field.