Progress in urban resilience research and hotspot analysis: a global scientometric visualization analysis using CiteSpace

Increasing global climate change has led to increasingly sudden, abnormal, and complex natural disasters. Global disaster governance is facing complex and severe challenges. Urban resilience research (URR) can help cities withstand disasters and quickly recover from adversities through the rational allocation of resources. Consequently, URR has attracted considerable attention from urban ecology researchers. Over the past decade, despite an increasing number of articles reported on URR, there has been no systematic theoretical framework, no comprehensive review of the research, and no clarity on how different perspectives have evolved. This research selects 1647 articles related to global urban resilience from the Web of Science Core Collection and performs a global scientometric visualization analysis using CiteSpace and ArcGIS software. In this study, we visually display the most productive institutions, authors, and sources in URR. Additionally, we explain how research topics have changed over time and analyze research frontiers. The results show that (1) URR has accelerated globally in the last decade; (2) research hotspots are mainly concentrated in environmental science and ecology, science and technology, and water resources; and (3) URR is gradually becoming a multidisciplinary research field. Our research reveals the status and future trends of URR through quantitative visualization methods, helping to address some emerging and unexpected risks and vulnerabilities. SUPPORTING INFORMATION: The online version of this article (10.1007/s11356-022-20138-9)