Study of Corpus’ Influences in EAP Research (2009-2018): A Bibliometric Analysis in CiteSpace

Abstract

Using 328 papers published in SSCI (Social Science Citation Index) journals from the Web of Science between 2009 and 2018, this study analyzed corpus’ influences in EAP (English for Academic Purposes) research with mapping knowledge domains CiteSpace. This study found that the relationship between international EAP studies and corpus tends to increasingly tight in the past ten years. Corpus in EAP study mainly acts as the methodology that EAP is studied by means of self-building or existing corpora using retrieval software together with statistical analysis method. International scholars pay more attention to writing teaching, academic literacy and discourse/discourse analysis in EAP study, and the co-cited references mostly tend to the genres study of EAP.