Exploring the global research trends of land use planning based on a bibliometric analysis: Current status and future prospects

Abstract

The land topic has generally become a major socioeconomic issue that currently attracts attention globally. To explore the issue, various countries devote much attention to land use planning. This paper searches the Core Collection of the Web of Science and collects 1771 land use planning articles published between 1990 and 2019. The R software, biblioshiny package, and CiteSpace are applied in this paper. The results show the following: (1) the number of papers related to land use planning has shown an overall growth trend, which can be divided into the following four stages: initial exploration, preliminary growth, stable development, and rapid development; (2) the United States is in an absolute leading position as the primary research force among developed countries. The top 3 countries related to international cooperation are the United States, China, and Italy; (3) land use planning, land use, GIS, urban planning, China, spatial planning and climate change are some high-frequency keywords used in land use planning; (4) the current research hot spots mainly focus on the relationship between land use spatial planning and regional planning, land informatization development, public participation, urban sprawl, and sustainable development; (5) the themes show 8 evolutionary paths related to the following four topics: ecosystem protection, climate and natural change, urban sprawl and agricultural development, and GIS development; (6) this paper proposes that strengthening integration within disciplines, introducing new theories and methods, and sustainable land use will become future research directions requiring more land use planning attention.