A review on ecosystem health research: A visualization based on CiteSpace

Abstract

With ecological environments that play vital roles in sustaining human communities worsening, ecological health has drawn extensive attention from scholars and practitioners. It is obvious that research results relevant to ecological health are increasing. This study applies scientometric methods to evaluate the current situation of ecological heath research, and explore the developing trends of ecological health research based on the literature data obtained from the Web of Science Core Collection database. Study results generated in this paper could clearly answer the three following questions: (1) What are the subject categories that scholars are most concerned about in the ecological health research area? (2) Which authors and journals are the most representative in this area? On which research areas do researchers focus at different stages? What are the documents that attract scholarly attention? (3) What are the representative keywords in the different periods? What are the research focuses and the new emerging trends in the field of ecological health? In general, this paper provides an effective research method to evaluate the performance of ecological health research. The paper may assist new researchers to pick out the most relevant journals, articles, keywords, and influential authors, consequently assisting researchers to be at the research frontier in the ecological health field, and finally, to establish future research directions.