A Bibliometric Analysis of the Trends and Characteristics of Railway Research

Abstract

A retrospective bibliometric analysis of the railway sector covering the 20-year period between 2002 and 2021 was carried out to better understand the characteristics of the railway research. The Scopus database contained 1918 articles published with the keywords “Rail System”. VOSviewer software was used to create network maps from each of the variables studied. The results showed a huge increase in the number of publications over this period—notably, work written by Zhang, Y.T., who was found to be the most productive author. Engineering was found to be the most studied subject area of knowledge; Transportation Research Record was the journal with the highest number of publications; and China was revealed to be the leading country regarding this research field, Southwest Jiaotong University being the leading institution in this topic. Finally, there was a lack of research on the environmental impact and sustainability of railway systems, an area that could be opened up for future study.