Development of Human Geography in Taiwan in the Last Decade

Human geographers in Taiwan are distributed in five geography departments and various social science and education departments. In spite of the small population, their publications are well represented in five major geographical journals in Chinese and a few international journals in the English-speaking world. Apart from summarizing the growth of departments, this paper introduces the subfields and specialties represented by geographers in major universities, surveys the publications in the ten years between 1996 and 2005, and uses a bibliometric approach to analyze the progress made in human geography. The subject matters approach used by the Human Geographical Society of Japan has been used with regard to the above analysis. Geographic research reflects social change in Taiwan, as well as follows paradigmatic waves in English-speaking countries, particularly Anglo-America from where most of Taiwan's geographers obtained their degrees. Led by new paradigms in human geography, geographers tended to cooperate with other social scientists in the 1990's, thus resulting in disparate fields of interest among geographers, particularly in economic, urban, social and population geography. While empirical studies predominate, social relevance is demonstrated in all the new themes being studied. The future growth of human geography depends on further interdisciplinary cooperation, collaboration with international scholars, and the participation by young scholars, leading to a breakaway from traditional subjects of research and methodology.