Evolution of urban mineral resources research based on knowledge maps

Abstract

Urban mineral resources are an inevitable product of industrialization and urbanization process, which has significant ecological and economic values. Scientific and comprehensive research on urban mineral resources is conducive to their sustainable development and use. This study combined scientometrics with text mining methods, and took 4351 Chinese publications on urban mineral resources from 1988 to 2018 as the research object to quantitatively analyze the dynamic change of relevant research in this field over the period and future development. The results show that (1) The development of urban mineral resources research in China is in a bottleneck period and there are five main research teams in the field, mainly conducting theoretical research. Among these five teams, Zhai Xin and Zhou Yongsheng’s teams begin earlier in this field in 2010- 2014, Zhao Yuzhu and Li Jinhui’s teams are more prominent in 2015- 2016, and Wang Chang’s team becomes more prominent in 2017- 2018. (2) “Mineral Resources”(1995), “Sustainable Development”(2002),“Mining Cities”(2004),“Resource- Based Cities”(2005) and “Recycling Economy”(2007) play an important role of transition in the formation of “urban mineral resources”(2010), which is related to the deepening of people’s understanding of urban mineral resources. (3) The research hotspots in this field are distinctive and clearly influenced by government policies in different time period, and incorporating social concerns is the future development trend. (4) Policy tools and technological advancement and innovation are the important topics for future research in this field. The analysis of change of urban mineral resources research based on literature mining can help researchers and decision makers to quickly understand and grasp the current status and trend of the research, and provide an important reference for the in-depth research and decision-making of urban mineral resource development.