The Scientometric Approach of Mapping Sustainable Green Infrastructure Research Developments

Abstract

While sustainable green infrastructure research has progressed substantially in the last decade, there has been a lack of study mapping on the developments of existing research publications in this area. This research aims to systematically review and map the development of existing publications during the period of 2009 – 2019 using the Scientometric review approach of Scopus metadata and VOSviewer software. The results show there were 1784 publications and 4894 authors from 109 countries, with the top 3 countries, i.e. the United States (472 publications), the UK (162 publications) and China (151 publications). The top 3 rankings of the main research area trends were green infrastructure (260), sustainability (211), and sustainability development (134). The publications were dominated by articles (50.2%), conference papers (32.2%), book chapters (7%), reviews (7%), and books (6.4%), which consist of 338 open-access documents, and 1396 closed-access documents. The top 3 authors with the most citations were Wang J. (261 citations), Jensen M.B. (82 citations) and Haase D. (76 citations). The outcomes of this study are expected to fill the existing research gap as well as to provide an overview of the development of sustainable green infrastructure research publications and to see future research development opportunities.