As an essential part of ecosystem services, the rural ecosystem service (rES) plays an irreplaceable role in sustainable development. However, research on rESs still needs improvement compared with urban ecosystem services. Aiming at analyzing the research and development trends in rES, three types of bibliometric analysis software, HistCite, VOSviewer, and CiteSpace, are applied to reveal and visualize the research status and the prospect of existing research. The results show that since 2015, there has been a significant increase in the number of countries, papers, and institutions studying rES. There are five main research areas, among which urbanization and nature’s contribution to people (NCP) are ongoing. Moreover, the research content gradually shifted from fundamental studies on the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem services to the relationships between different stakeholders and rESs against the background of complex social relations and cultural settings in urbanization. However, there is still a lack of leading ancestor literature in the field, and this field still needs to be developed.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.