Sustainable Development of Eco-Cities: A Bibliometric Review

Abstract

With the increase in the urban population, nearly 70% of future people will live in cities, which will not only bring massive consumption of resources but also cause irreversible damage to the urban ecological environment. Therefore, the study of sustainable development of eco-cities (SDEC) has received wide attention from academics. In this paper, a bibliometric analysis of journal articles on sustainable development of ecological cities using the Web of Science Core Collection database from 1990 to 2021 is conducted to analyze the current status, hotspots, and research trends in this field. The results of this study reveal the evolution of the number of publications, major research disciplines, authors, countries, and institutions in this research field over the last three decades. Regarding research hotspots, SDEC research has focused on cleaner production, sustainable buildings, municipal solid waste management, energy policy, and carbon emissions in China. With the emergence of climate change, carbon emission limitation, and sustainable development requirements, scholars’ research targeting performance analysis and whole life cycle assessment of urban ecosystems will gradually become a mainstream trend. In the future, technological innovation still needs to be strengthened, and we should enhance the research on stakeholders in ecological city construction and study the impact of urban ecological transformation on social, economic, and environmental changes.

Towards Green and Sustainable Healthcare: A Literature Review and Research Agenda for Green Leadership in the Healthcare Sector

“…The number of publications over time, or the growth trend, is one of the most relevant factors as to how much scholars are interested in a specific topic, and is an indicator of the expansion of a field of research [44][45][46]. Figure 2 shows the yearly distribution of the selected articles on green and sustainable healthcare in the last decade.…”

Analysis of changes in the spatiotemporal characteristics of impervious surfaces and their influencing factors in the Central Plains Urban Agglomeration of China from 2000 to 2018

“…In the process of urban expansion, the change of greening coverage area, to a certain extent, reflects the level of urban construction expansion and urban ecological construction. The changes in green coverage area in the built-up areas have the strongest explanatory power for the changes in the ISA, indicating that the changes in green coverage area and ISA have strong similarity in terms of spatial distributions, and the urban construction in the CPUA is integrated with ecological development, focusing on the construction of ecological cities [ 35 ]. The q -value of F2 slightly increased in the period of T2.…”

The Correlation between Urban Form and Carbon Emissions: A Bibliometric and Literature Review

“…This time span was chosen because there were scarcely any publications available on the relevant topics before 2000. The WOS database is a Clarivate platform that provides access to numerous publications, including thousands of reputable and high-impact scholarly articles from around the world [25,26]. It should be emphasized that the WOS database contains results from numerous Chinese authors, confirming that Chinese scholars have made important contributions.…”