Scientific Landscape of Sustainable Urban and Rural Areas Research: A Systematic Scientometric Analysis

Abstract

Urban and rural areas are the cradles of human development and civilization as all practical progress and feasible products have emerged from these places. Having a clear understanding of the sustainability of these areas, especially the progress of research in this field, is highly important. This study undertakes a comprehensive scientometric analysis to visualize and quantitatively measure the outcome of the scientific enterprise to construct sustainable urban and rural areas. The scientific productivity of recorded publications, their impacts, and their importance were systematically measured in diverse aspects by virtue of ten distinctive techniques. A critical assessment of the respected criteria for sustainable urban and rural areas is presented in order to further clarify its boundaries with other related topics, as well as providing a clear benchmark for future studies. After screening the search results between 1900 and 2018 on the Web of Science database, 7397 publications explicitly related to sustainable urban and rural areas were extracted and analyzed by the CiteSpace software via the relevant bibliometric indicators. The results of this study shed light on the trends and patterns, consisting of kernel research areas, countries, journals, institutions, and how these entities have been concatenated, inside the bibliographic records around sustainable urban and rural areas. The findings facilitate in identifying the barriers and weakness in the current sustainable urban and rural areas research, and consequently help in identifying auspicious directions for prospective investigations.