Abstract
Many cities worldwide are using re-greening strategies to help reverse urbanization patterns that aggravate environmental issues. Green infrastructure (GI) has become a significant and effective strategy to address environmental problems. To better understand GI, this study uses CiteSpace to analyze 5420 published papers in the field of GI on the Web of Science database from 1990-2020. This bibliometric analysis will help new scholars and researchers to better understand the current status and trends in GI research, as well as identify further research needed in the field. This study evaluated research on GI trends according to publication amounts, keywords, journals, disciplines, countries, institutions, and authors. Results show that, first, GI research has experienced rapid growth since 2014. Second, GI, ecosystem services, and city are the top three keywords related to GI research, with green roof as the keyword with the strongest linkage. Third, Sustainability, Urban Forestry and Urban Greening, and Landscape and Urban Planning are the top three journals publishing GI research. Fourth, the top three disciplines researching GI are environmental science, engineering, and science and technology. Fifth, the USA is the top ranked country in terms of the number of published GI-related papers (1514 papers), followed by China (730 papers) and England (546 papers). Sixth, the US Environmental Protection Agency (84 papers) is the top institution in terms of publications, followed by the Chinese Academy of Science (83 papers) and the Swedish University of Agriculture (66 papers). Finally, D. Haase has the most published articles (29 papers), followed by S. Pauleit (28 papers) and P. Angelstam (26 papers). These findings indicate that GI has developed significantly in the last 30 years, with a high probability for increased growth in the future.
Highlights
Urbanization has drastically amplified the impacts of climate change, resulting in a series of environmental issues related to climate change adaptation, stormwater management, health and well-being, reductions in green space, lack of biodiversity, and unsustainable development; these circumstances had sparked a rebirth in the regreening of cities, naturebased solutions to flooding, and ecological planning [1,2,3,4,5,6]
Citation numbers were no more than 300 per year. This indicates that green infrastructure (GI) was at its initial stage, in terms of global research trends
This study used CiteSpace for a bibliometric analysis of GI related published papers (5420 papers) from the Web of Science (WOS) database from 1990–2020. These published papers were downloaded as the initial database and input in CiteSpace. This was followed by visualization and marking of the research trends by stage, keyword timeline/burst, distribution of keywords, journals, disciplines, countries, institutions, authors, and cocitation of GI
Summary
Urbanization has drastically amplified the impacts of climate change, resulting in a series of environmental issues related to climate change adaptation, stormwater management, health and well-being, reductions in green space, lack of biodiversity, and unsustainable development; these circumstances had sparked a rebirth in the regreening of cities, naturebased solutions to flooding, and ecological planning [1,2,3,4,5,6]. Urban scholars, city planners, and policymakers emphasize sustainable development as a key approach to addressing these issues [7,8,9]. The number of scientific publications, books, and policy and planning documents referring to GI have rapidly increased in recent decades [17,18,19,20,21]
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