Study on sustainable urbanization literature based on Web of Science, scopus, and China national knowledge infrastructure: A scientometric analysis in CiteSpace

Abstract

As the world enters a new round of large-scale urbanization, the coordination of a balance between social, economic, and environmental systems to promote sustainable urban development has become a global focus. Scholars have explored sustainable urbanization, collected relevant literature, and analyzed the influence of research in different countries, finding that China’s influence is second only to that of the US. Accordingly, this study uses the literature in China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), the world’s largest Chinese database. It selects 3640 studies on sustainable urbanization from Web of Science and Scopus (W&S), and CNKI. Using the bibliometric method in Citespace, it systematically analyzes the research status, development course, and potential trends of research on sustainable urbanization. The results show that: (1) The number of studies on sustainable urbanization in CNKI is decreasing by year, while it has increased gradually in W&S. China currently has the most literature in the field of sustainable urbanization. The US, China, and Germany have the most influential studies. (2) W&S and CNKI each have their separate and complementary emphases. (3) The two datasets are more similar in terms of the nature of their research institutions, but cooperation between the institutions is closer in W&S than in CNKI. There are no aggregation or scaling effects in the Chinese research institutions. The Chinese Academy of Sciences and Hong Kong Polytechnic University are leaders in this field. (4) The top five topics in the studies from W&S are urban development models and public administration, urban planning issues, protection of urban ecosystems, urban land-use changes, and pollution and resource consumption during urbanization. The top five topics in the CNKI studies are strategy of sustainable development, urban development, urbanization and population urbanization, land financing and urban economics, and urban development planning. The construction of urban ecosystems with reasonable structure, efficient processes, and complete functions is an important breakthrough in the application of sustainable urbanization. Reasonably controlling the pace of urban expansion, efficiently coordinating urban and rural development, formulating evidence-based urban development strategies, and ensuring the living standard of urban settlements are the key problems in sustainable urbanization, and will become important directions for related future research.