A systematic analysis of Sustainable Urban Development research during 2002-2021

More than two-thirds of the world’s population is likely to reside in urban areas by 2050. Rapid urbanization contributes to many contemporary challenges that confront cities. Sustainable urban development (SUD) is a widespread area of investigation that can be considered from various attitudes, such as environment, economy, society, technology, culture, and so on. This paper aimed to perform a bibliometric analysis of “sustainable urban development” research during 2002-2021, considering source types, subject areas, document types, affiliations, journals, countries, authors, and keywords. Also, Social Network Anal­ysis was applied to recognize mapping trends, status, and hot spots in SUD research and to discover co-authorship relations and international collaborations among countries worldwide. The results of this study showed that the number of SUD-relat­ed publications has remarkably increased by more than sixteen times over the study period. Social sciences” (24.6%), “envi­ronmental science” (21.2%), and “engineering” (13.4%) were the three major subject areas. China, with 539 publications (20.3%), was the most productive country in terms of the num­ber of publications. The most independent rate of the publica­tions belonged to India (76.5%), while Hong Kong ranked 1st in cooperator publications (61.6%). The “Sustainability” pub­lished the most related articles, followed by “Journal of Cleaner Production” and “Sustainable Cities And Society.” Among the top ten productive institutes and organizations, five affiliations were from China. “Deep learning,” “circular economy,” “big data,” “air pollution,” “spatial analysis,” “urban resilience,” “urban heat island,” “system dynamics,” and “cultural heritage” were the most increasing keywords in recent years, based on the author keywords analysis.

A systematic analysis of Sustainable Urban Development research during 2002-2021 Keywords:

Sustainable Urban Development , Sustainable Development , Bibliometric Analysis , Social Network Analysis , Research Trend