The emergence of residential satisfaction studies in social research: A bibliometric analysis

Abstract

This research aims to review the total collection of literature on the ‘residential satisfaction’ concept used in social research from 1961 to 2020, and provides a complete overview on how social research concerning ‘residential satisfaction’ has emerged and developed in the last 60 years. We follow the theoretical framework of bibliometric analysis and use the bibliometric datasets retrieved from Web of Science and Scopus's online resources. After compiling and processing the datasets, we used a final dataset containing 877 documents on residential satisfaction. The open-source statistical and visualisation software packages R and VOSviewer were used mainly for processing and analysing datasets. The results visualise information on the top authors, the most influential documents by citation, the most productive countries, and other criteria. The lexical network analysis shows that residential satisfaction has a strong co-occurrence association with the two frequently occurring terms ‘neighbourhood’ and ‘satisfaction’. The majority of research on residential satisfaction has been conducted in the United States, China, and the United Kingdom. The top three most influential journals for residential satisfaction research are ‘Social Indicators Research’, ‘Environment and Development’, and ‘Habitat International’. This bibliometric analysis frames the future research demand for residential satisfaction in social research.