Knowledge Map of Climate Change and Transportation: A Bibliometric Analysis Based on CiteSpace

Abstract

Climate change has become one of the leading problems around the world. The transport sector is one of the major contributors to climate change. At the same time, climate change is also affecting transportation facilities and travel behaviour. This study proposed a bibliometric approach to explore the structure evolution development trends of this knowledge domain with a broader search scope and more objective results compared with a manual review. A total of 4073 peer-reviewed articles were collected from the WoS core collection database to conduct scientometric analysis. The collaboration analysis shows that the US, China, and European countries dominate this field, and international organisations’ and government agencies’ reports on climate change form the basis of this research field. A total of 14 co-citation clusters were identified, and the research on climate change and transportation primarily focused on the topics of policy options, travel behaviour, the COVID-19 lockdown, environmental cost, and air quality. Keyword co-occurrence evolution analysis was also conducted to track the latest research trends. Based on the results, we propose trends in four areas for future research. This study provides a holistic knowledge map for climate change and transportation research’s past, present, and future.