Knowledge-Mapping Analysis of Urban Sustainable Transportation Using CiteSpace

Abstract

With the accelerating process of global urbanization, environmental protection has become a hot issue for researchers, practitioners, and policy makers, with such questions as how to make urban transportation markedly sustainable to meet the pace of sustainable economic and social growth. This study visualizes and quantifies the extant publications on urban sustainable transportation research on Web of Science using CiteSpace for a wide range of research topics, including the intellectual structure, development, and evolution of urban sustainable transportation. First, this study presents the characteristics of a number of published papers in relevant fields and time stages, including publication in journals, co-occurrence of keywords, co-occurrence of disciplines and fields, and co-occurrence of the literature through network analysis. This study identifies the basic research contents and high-frequency knowledge contents of urban sustainable transportation. Second, this research analyzes the authors’ cooperation, national cooperation, and research institute cooperation networks. This study identifies the most influential authors, research institutions, and countries. Lastly, this study identifies the research frontiers and trend themes from 1991 to 30 September 2022 through co-citation clustering and research on burst detection, a combination of bibliometric methods, and a systematic review. Accordingly, this study demonstrates the research progress in this field from the perspectives of multiple themes, such as land development and utilization, sustainable transportation systems, low-carbon paths, public transport, electric vehicles, sharing modes, traveler behavior, and smart cities. These aspects provide readers with a preliminary understanding of the development of urban sustainable transportation, indicating that multidisciplinary, multiprofessional, and multiangle cooperation and analysis will become the dominant trend in this field.