Bibliometric analysis on African Urbanization studies: patterns and trends of published articles

ABSTRACT

The process of urbanization in Africa is receiving global attention and is subject to comprehensive scientific research due to the wide socioeconomic influence of this continent. Adopting specific search terms and strategies, this paper conducts a statistical analysis of the research articles addressing African urbanization (n = 2046) from the Web of Science core collection. The results show that since 2006, research on African urbanization has entered a stage of rapid development. South Africa and the Global North are the main regions engaged in research on African urbanization. With the application of the bibliometric software HistCite, this paper tries to investigate the research streams and trends contributed by highly cited articles. The main research streams can be divided into 5 areas, with the relationship between disciplines becoming stronger. Population, economy and land-use are the core issues of African urbanization studies, with the largest volume of highly cited articles. Furthermore, the changes in research hotspots were explored based on keyword analysis by CiteSpace. The results indicate that the topics of research hot spots by African and Global North researchers are different, and the Global North has a stronger influence on African urbanization studies.

KEYWORDS:

• African urbanization
• South Africa
• bibliometric
• Urban economy
• Urban poverty

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Prof. Zhongjin Jiang from Nanjing University, who has been engaged in African Economic Geography research for more than 60 years and still continues his work. The authors admire his spirit of scientific research and thank him for the constructive suggestions on improving this paper.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Social Science Fund of China [No.20FJYA003]; National Key R&D Program of China [No.2018YFE0105900].