A Bibliometric Analysis of Chinese Ecological and Environmental Research on Urbanization

Abstract

Based on an urbanization research database, a bibliometric analysis of Chinese ecological environmental research on urbanization was conducted that examined output, focused fields, topics, theories and methods. Results show that research output in this field has been increasing since 2005. Land and industry fields in resource research, economics in ecological research, and climate and urban environments in environmental research have been studied from 1992–2011. Keywords analysis discovered that “Land Use” and “Heat Island Effect” were major keywords, making up 0.15% and 0.09% of the total frequency, respectively. “Heat Island Effect” and “Climate Change” were the most recent popular keywords. Main theories were derived from ecology, mathematics, resource environmental economics and environmental science. Ecological footprint has been a core theory since 2002. The stochastic impacts by regression on population, affluence and technology model (STIRPAT), Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC), and slope, land use map, excluded area, urban area, transportation map and hillside area model (SLEUTH) are the latest popular theories. During 1992–2011, the main research methods can be divided into four groups: statistics (65.17%), systems (13.11%), mechanisms (11.79%) and evaluation (9.93%). Grey System Analysis from system methods and rescaled range (R/S) analysis from evaluation are the latest popular methods. Topics from macro subfields, including land use, heat island effects, water resources and the agricultural ecological environment received more attention than micro subfields such as urban environmental health problems. As urbanization problems evolve, resource environmental economic comprehensive models will advance with modeling progress and some models, such as STIRPAT and land use change simulation models, will be developed for evaluation and simulation of the ecological environmental impacts of Chinese urbanization.