Research themes of geographical information science during 1991–2020: a retrospective bibliometric analysis

Abstract

About 30 years have passed since Michael F. Goodchild proposed the term geographical information science (GIScience) in 1992. In the past 30 years, GIScience has made great progress in expanding research findings and perfecting theories and methods. To understand the development progress of GIScience, this research conducts a bibliometric analysis of 9400 publications between 1991 and 2020 in 10 international refereed journals and 2 international conferences of GIScience. We analyze the publication statistics and trends in GIScience from two aspects of journals/conferences and countries/territories. Based on the community detection of the citation network, we extract 15 research themes and show their leading authors and highly cited articles. Furthermore, the change of publication number in different themes over time can indicate the evolution of some research focuses in GIScience. The results demonstrate that the publication proportions of some themes grow rapidly, such as “moving object,” “volunteered geographic information,” and “geographically weight regression,” while the publication proportions of some themes are decreasing, such as “digital elevation model,” “planning support system,” and “ontology.” In the discussion, the journal distribution of papers on different themes is discussed. Moreover, we suggest a few research directions that are worthy of attention in the future.

Keywords:

• GIScience
• citation network
• community detection
• research theme
• research trend

Acknowledgments

We sincerely acknowledge Dr. Stephen Hirtle and the anonymous referees for their insightful comments. We also thank Keli Wang and Xiaoyue Xing for their valuable suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data and codes availability statement

The data and codes that support the findings of this study are available at the link https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.19242654.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [nos. 41830645, 41625003].

Notes on contributors

Xiaohuan Wu

Xiaohuan Wu is working toward a Ph.D. degree in cartography and geographical information system with the Institute of Remote Sensing and Geographical Information Systems, Peking University, Beijing. Her research interests include GIScience, network analysis, and bibliometrics. Her main contributions to the paper include designing and conducting the analysis, writing original draft preparation, and revising.

Weihua Dong

Weihua Dong is a professor in the Faculty of Geographical Science at Beijing Normal University. His research focuses on geospatial cognition and brain-like intelligent navigation. His main contributions to the paper are research design and revision.

Lun Wu

Lun Wu is a Professor at the Institute of Remote Sensing and Geographical Information Systems, Peking University. His current research interests include GIScience, smart city, and digital twin. His main contributions to the paper are research design and revision.

Yu Liu

Yu Liu is Boya Professor of GIScience at the Institute of Remote Sensing and Geographical Information Systems, Peking University. His research mainly concentrates on humanities and social science based on big geo-data. His main contributions to the paper are conceptualization, methodology, revision, and supervision.