Research progress mapping on urban sprawl: a bibliometric analysis

Bibliometric analysis serves as a systematic approach for the examination and analysis of extensive scientific data sets. The methodology enables an examination of the evolutionary complexities of a specific field and highlights its emerging areas. This paper aims to present a comprehensive picture of research progress mapping in “Urban Sprawl.” This study considered 3561 articles published by Web of Science (WoS) between 2005 and 2024. RStudio and VOSviewer were used to map the research progress on “Urban Sprawl”. The results encompass visual representations of published document data, annual publication trends, leading authors, most cited papers, prominent journals, top organisations, top countries, and frequently occurring author’s keywords. We employed lexical networks, co-authorship with countries networks, citation-source networks, citation-counties, co-authorship with organisations networks, and citation-author networks to create network visualisations and overlay visualisations illustrating the co-occurrence of all terms within bibliometric networks. The lexical network analysis reveals that the three commonly occurring terms “urbanisation”, land use, and “urban” have a substantial co-occurrence association with urban sprawl. Most of the study has been done in China, the USA and Italy. “Sustainability”, “Land Use Policy”, and “Land” are the three most important journals. This study frames the desire for more research on urban sprawl.