Sustainable brownfield redevelopment and planning: Bibliometric and visual analysis

Environmental and urban sciences have shown that brownfield problems significantly impact human behavior and the environment. Understanding the sustainable planning and redevelopment of brownfields can help governments and financial partners consider sustainable urban policies a key priority. This study presents a bibliometric analysis of research publications on the sustainable redevelopment of brownfields through the Scopus database since 1990. The redevelopment of brownfields has an essential role in urban sustainability, so research trends on the sustainable redevelopment of brownfields in previous literature are revealed. To our knowledge, the bibliometric analysis of the term sustainable redevelopment of brownfields is not yet an accentuated field of research. To do this, this study aims to fill this gap by offering a broad overview of the bibliometric analysis of the literature relating to this term. Brownfield and contaminated land are used as keywords in the article titles taken from the Scopus database on September 07, 2021. A total of 7197 scientific articles (Scopus) were reviewed to show how the research on “brownfields or contaminated land” has emerged and developed. Social media analysis (VOSviewer) was used for data visualization, and Harzing's Publish or Perish used for metrics and citation analysis. The results showed an increase in the growth rate of the literature on sustainable brownfield redevelopment since 1990, particularly from 2011 to 2020. Research related to the sustainable redevelopment of brownfields has involved various authors and is published in various languages. There are 160 authors from 126 countries and 160 institutions. China is the largest contributor to this study, followed by the United States and the United Kingdom. The Chemosphere Journal has published the most articles on the sustainable redevelopment of brownfields. Although our results also indicate that studies on the sustainable redevelopment of brownfields are mainly carried out in the field of environmental sciences. Some avenues for future research have been analyzed in three directions so that sustainable development can easily be integrated into a brownfield redevelopment project.