Abstract
Studies on human mobility have a long history with increasingly strong interdisciplinary connections across social science, environmental science, information and technology, computer science, engineering, and health science. However, what is lacking in the current research is a synthesis of the studies to identify the evolutional pathways and future research directions. To address this gap, we conduct a systematic review of human mobility-related studies published from 1990 to 2020. Drawing on the selected publications retrieved from the Web of Science, we provide a bibliometric analysis and network visualisation using CiteSpace and VOSviewer on the number of publications and year published, authors and their countries and afflictions, citations, topics, abstracts, keywords, and journals. Our findings show that human mobility-related studies have become increasingly interdisciplinary and multi-dimensional, which have been strengthened by the use of the so-called ‘big data’ from multiple sources, the development of computer technologies, the innovation of modelling approaches, and the novel applications in various areas. Based on our synthesis of the work by top cited authors we identify four directions for future research relating to data sources, modelling methods, applications, and technologies. We advocate for more in-depth research on human mobility using multi-source big data, improving modelling methods and integrating advanced technologies including artificial intelligence, and machine and deep learning to address real-world problems and contribute to social good.
Highlights
We present the analytical results using CiteSpace and VOSviewer based on co-citation references, co-authorship, and co-occurring keywords to depict the evolutional and emerging trends in the field of human mobility research
We present a systematic literature review of human mobility-related (HMR) studies published from 1990 to 2020 by a bibliometric analysis and network visualisation
HMR related publications retrieved from Web of Science (WOS) to identify the emerging trends, popular domains and research frontiers in the field of human mobility
Summary
Due to the essential nature of human mobility, studies on human mobility have been multi-disciplinary and conducted in a wide range of research paradigms, including social science, environmental science, information and computer science, engineering, mathematical science, and physical science, biological science, and medical and health science. As human populations become highly mobile in the modern world with the prevalence of diverse transport modes, measuring human mobility serves as the essential method to study how human beings respond to and interact with the urban and natural environments [13]. HMR studies integrating into the field of information and computer science, engineering, mathematical science, and physical science have contributed a wide range of measuring and modelling approaches to capture human mobility patterns at both the individual and aggregated population levels [5]. Understanding the interand intra-disciplinary connections in HMR studies is important to explore future research paradigm, which, has been rarely addressed in the current scholarship—the knowledge gap this study aims to fulfil
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