Current Situation and Topics on the International Museum Volunteers Service Research

In recent years, the number of visitors to museums has increased, which poses a great challenge to the public service capacity of museums. The participation of volunteers can alleviate the shortage of manpower in museums, so they have become one of the important roles to help museums realize their social functions. Based on the data from the Web of Science Core Corpus, this paper uses bibliometric method and co-word clustering analysis to sort out the publication trend, main research direction, ranking of published countries/regions, and cooperation among countries/regions, institutions and authors. In addition, key word co-occurrence and research topic knowledge atlas are also drawn. The results show that the international museum volunteer research can be divided into two categories: one focus on volunteer ontology and the other focus on volunteer participation cases, involving cultural heritage, biodiversity, citizen science, ecology and science education, community and other fields. Finally, suggestions are put forward from the perspectives of volunteer research and training, standard construction and community experience interpretation to provide reference for the research and practice of museum volunteers in China.