Rockfall Research: A Bibliometric Analysis and Future Trends

Abstract

Rockfall is one of the main phenomena in mountainous environments due to its fast and high speed of movement, its unpredictability, and, therefore, the difficulty of identifying signs of instability and detachment of the blocks. Compared to other types of sliding, the proportion of rockfall research is smaller and sometimes little known, but, in the last five years, rapid growth in this area has been shown. Therefore, this research aimed to review the intellectual structure of rockfall, through analysis of scientific production using bibliometric techniques that allow its analysis, knowledge, global evolution, and future trends in rockfall. The research methodology consists of three steps: (1) data compilation, (2) software and data cleaning, and (3) analysis, interpretation, and visualization. This analysis focuses on the period from 1975 to 2019. For the data, a total of 811 academic publications were retrieved from the Scopus database. The results indicate an increasing trend of annual publications on rockfall. This analysis reveals the main topics, countries, and most influential institutions in the world that have carried out relevant research in scientific publications; it also shows the journals that have the most publications. VOSviewer software was adopted to evaluate the co-occurrence of author keywords. Currently, the hotspots rockfall issues mainly include: hazard-risk assessment, remote sensing, and rockfall monitoring. Finally, this article analyzes the limitations of current research and proposes a future direction for the development of new research.

Geodiversity and Mining Towards the Development of Geotourism: A Global Perspective

“…Only articles are considered in this process, excluding conference articles, books and chapters, editorials, notes and letters. This criterion is based on the fact that journal articles are considered certified knowledge [24]. Nine hundred seventy-six articles (976) were obtained.…”

“…Bibliometric analyzes first initiated by López-Muñoz et al [23]. They allow to structure the knowledge of a specific field of study, through the quantitative analysis of its intellectual structure, patterns and evolution over time [24]. This type of analysis has carried out in various academic disciplines [25,26], among them, the earth sciences [4].…”

Research Trends in Career Success: A Bibliometric Review

“…These bibliometric studies have allowed the study in various fields of knowledge such as business and management [54][55][56], education [57,58], geoscience [59,60].…”

“…The first, performance analysis, allows one to evaluate the impact of publications by contrasting information that relates these documents to related authors, countries, and institutions. The second approach is bibliometric mapping, also called science mapping, which is a graphic representation that allows for the visualizing and identifying of the structure of the field of study and its relationships with the main research topics [52,60].…”

“…This bibliometric analysis facilitates the structuring of a research field, resulting in more active study areas and emerging trends [50,154,155]. The analysis emphasizes the most prominent authors in this line of professional success research, and they are related through citation records [53,60]. The proposed bibliometric network construction was carried out with VOSviewer, using a similarity measure called association strength to analyse the co-citation data [78].…”