A Systematic Review on City Liveability Global Research in the Built Environment: Publication and Citation Matrix

Abstract

This study is an investigation of urban liveability issues in the city development. The study focuses on the appraisal of global research output on urban liveability over the period of 35 years (1980-2015). Bibliometric methods had been carried out to identify and evaluate the productivity of top authors, document types, journals, countries, affiliations, and sources. Data were extracted from scholarly literature published in the leading indexing databases namely – Thomson Reuter’s Web of Science and Elsevier’s SciVerse Scopus. In this note, a quantitative review of the outstanding global research output in the liveability related field to show a major trend of research and shed light on future direction. Data were analysed, presented and discussed the common characteristics in the top journals, hot, and highly cited articles and the focus areas including common keywords across the studies, researched and under-researched fields. The results revealed, ever since 2005, liveability research output is steadily increasing, with 2015 as the most prolific year. Australia, England, and the USA are the most productive countries. Urban Geography, Urban Design International, and International Development Planning Review are the leading journals in the field. While continuous research interest is prevalent in liveability related field with global collaborative potentials, areas receiving the least research attention such as urban transportation, education, and resiliency could give a directional trend for future urban studies. Liveability Research Matrix established in this research were aimed to guide future research in finding the gap across global context, areas and multi-disciplinary.