The Emergence of Urban Studies as an Academic Field: Article and Journal Level Assessment of Its Development and Openness

Abstract

Urban Studies is an interdisciplinary and rapidly evolving field. The aim of this study is to assess the development of Urban Studies as an academic field from 2011 to 2019, by focusing on number of journals and articles, their openness, and their respective bibliometric indicators. A Scopus-based journal-level analysis and a Web of Science-based article-level analysis were performed. Publications from 2011 to 2019 were filtered for ‘Urban Studies’. In 2019, there were 193 Urban Studies journals compared to 83 journals in 2011. The percentage of open access publications increased from 25.6% in 2011 to 45% in 2019. The number of yearly publications was 13,007 in 2011 and expanded to 36,805 in 2019. The number of open access journals significantly increased from 18 (22%) in 2011 to 69 (35.9%) in 2019 (p = 0.005). Institution-based and small publishers are leading the way toward open access journals; the number of open access journals are significantly greater than the number put out by mainstream large publishers. Urban studies is a rapidly evolving interdisciplinary field with different related fields contributing to its development.