A bibliometric analysis on rural studies in human geography and related disciplines

Although the world has experienced rapid urbanization, rural areas have always been and are still an important research field in human geography. This paper performed a bibliometric analysis on rural geography studies based on the peer-reviewed articles concerning rural geography published in the SSCI-listed journals from 1990 to 2012. Our analysis examines publication patterns (document types and publishing languages, article outputs and their categories, major journals and their publication, most productive authors, geographic distribution and international collaboration) and demonstrates the evolution of intellectual development of rural geography by studying highly cited papers and their citation networks and temporal evolution of keywords. Our research findings include: The article number has been increasing since the 1900s, and went through three phases, and the rural geography research is dominated in size by UK and USA. The USA is the most productive in rural geography, but the UK had more impact than other countries in the terms of the average citation of articles. Three distinct but loosely linked research streams of rural geography were identified and predominated by the UK rural geographers. The keywords frequencies evolved according to contexts of rural development and academic advances of human geography, but they were loosely and scattered since the rural researches in different regions or different systems faced with different problems.