Academic Information
WU Bihu, XIAO Ye
It has been approved that academic life path and discipline tree techniques developed by time geographers are effective methods to examine academic thoughts and related activity characteristics for scientists. This paper utilized the techniques to explore the personal academic history of Professor Wang Enyong (1927-2023), the former vice president of the Geographical Society of China and a faculty member of College of Urban and Environmental Sciences, Peking University, who had rich life experience, a wide range of research interests, and plenty of academic writings in his life span of 95 years. On the statistical basis of his 192 papers and books which could be accessed from Internet and libraries from 1954 to 2019, the research findings are as follows: (1) It could be seen from the academic life path curve that the distribution of the number of Wang's works in the timeline showed the peaks off to the right. This reflected not only Wang's personal life growth path, but also the development pulse of contemporary Chinese politics, economy, culture and other fields. (2) According to academic life path table, the changes of Wang's academic disciplines distributed in the timeline could be further divided into four periods: the period of physical geography under the influence of the Soviet Union, the period of research stagnation and exploration, the period of multi-field exploration dominated by cultural and political geography, and the period of socialization and promotion of geography, which demonstrated both the shifts of Wang's personal research interests and the development trajectory of the whole Chinese geography in the past 70 years. (3) The integrated discipline tree displayed Wang's personal academic system, which included three levels of disciplinary relations: basic scientific research composed of geography, environmental science and pedagogy; in-depth research of human geography consisting of cultural geography, political geography and tourism geography; research on applied geography comprised of tourism planning, urban planning and environmental planning. The core academic graph displayed his representative research centered on the analysis main line of human-environment interactions in the fields of cultural geography and political geography. The discipline tree outlined the entire landscape of the academic community Wang managed throughout his life, together with the core academic graph revealing his profound academic influence till the end of the world.
