The Communist Party of China convened the Third Plenary Session of the 18th CPC Central Committee in 2013. In the Decision of the CPC Central Committee on Several Important Issues of Comprehensive Deepening Reform, the Communist Party of China officially announces that the overall goal of the comprehensively deepening reform is to improve and develop socialism with Chinese characteristics, to promote the modernization of the state governance system and governance capacity, and puts forward the issues of the state governance system and governance capacity, which promptly stimulated the enthusiasm of domestic academic community for state governance and state issues. Afterwards, the literature on the study of state governance increases rapidly from multiple disciplines. The theory of state governance based on China′s local experience is of great significance for the future development of domestic governance theory. Since the issue of governance is also an important issue in the international academic community for nearly 30 years, a comprehensive and comparative analysis of the domestic and foreign research on (state) governance can clarify the similarities and differences between the two, find the insights of the current situation, and put forward scientific suggestions for the future development of state governance theory. This paper analyses the literature in the field of state governance and carries out a comparative study of the domestic research and foreign research, by applying empirical statistical laws of bibliometrics (mainly Bradford′s Law and Lotka′s Law) and analytical methods (mainly Word Frequency Analysis and Co-word Analysis), and using Statistical Analysis Toolkit for Information (SATI), as well as visual analysis software NetDraw and Tagxedo creator.
    The paper takes CSSCI (China Social Science Citation Index) database as the source of Chinese literature data, because comparing to other databases CSSCI ensures the high quality of papers and less duplication of contents. A total of 1885 documents were obtained by using ‘state governance’ (in Chinese) as the key words for searching and within the time span of 1998-2017. The source of the English literature data of this research is SSCI (Social Science Citation Index) database, which is searched using the keyword of ‘governance’. The paper also restricts the retrieval field to ‘political science’ and ‘public administration’, because ‘state governance’ is not a very popular phrase in English (they used ‘governance’ instead of ‘state governance’) but the word ‘governance’ is also used in many fields such as ‘corporate governance’. 11674 English documents were found within the time span of 1989-2017.
    The following five aspects of the obtained Chinese and English documents were analyzed in order to identify the current research situation in ‘state governance’ field: (a) Analysis of the amount of research on ‘state governance’: by analyzing of the time and quantity of the articles published in the area, we can get insight into the achievements and the research heat of this field. (2) Analysis of ‘state governance’ publication source journals: by analyzing whether the publication source journals comply with Bradford′s Law, we would like to know whether there are stable core journals, stable researchers and readers in this field. (3) Analysis of the maturity of ‘state governance’ field: by analyzing whether the number of authors and the number of publications conform to Lotka′s law, we can study whether this field has developed into a mature research field. (4) Identification of research directions in the field of ‘state governance’: by analyzing the literature keywords using word frequency analysis and co-word analysis, we can identify the domestic and foreign research interests in this field. (5) Hotspots and evolution analysis of ‘state governance’: by grouping the keywords based on their appearance times, we can identify domestic and foreign research hotspots and the shift of hotspot in this field. 
    The study indicates that the development of governance theory in China is quite slow before the Third Plenary Session of the 18th CPC Central Committee in 2013. After the conference, the research fever has climbed to a peak at a very high speed. However, although it remains in a high-speed afterwards, there is not a large number of high-quality results published. The speed of development of this field in western countries has not changed as dramatically as it in China. It has been growing steadily over a much longer period since 1980s. Even though, we think that the study of state governance is still in its infancy, not only in China but also in western countries. Because our analysis finds that at present, neither core journals nor core authors and readers has taken stable shape, no matter in China or in western countries. By analyzing the research hotspots in this field, it is also found that the research hotspots in China are mainly focus on the state governance system, governance capacity and its modernization, comprehensive deepening reform, socialism with Chinese characteristics, auditing, rule of law, democracy and big data, and etc. At the same time, we notice that China′s research focus is largely guided and influenced by central government policies. With the changes of policy, there are obvious shifts in the research focuses. The foreign governance researches mainly focus on climate change, EU, democracy, responsibility, regulation, policy, government, global governance and so on. There has been no significant change over the past decade. Moreover, although there are obvious differences between domestic and foreign research hotspots, democracy and rule of law are the common topics both at home and abroad. This indicates that building a democratic and rule of law society through governance and to maximize the public interests are the shared views of all governments. Furthermore, it is worth noting that with the rapid development of China′s economy, ‘China’ has become a research keyword in the field of governance in other countries in recent years. Because of the time strains and wide coverage of state governance, this paper has not been able to compare specific research viewpoints between China and other countries in depth. It is expected that future research can select a few representative documents in the field of state governance and make a comparative analysis so as to bring more inspirations to national construction.