Scientometrics (2014) 101:39–59

DOI 10.1007/s11192-014-1388-2

A bibliometric analysis on rural studies in human

geography and related disciplines

Jieyong Wang • Zhigao Liu

Received: 13 April 2013 / Published online: 24 August 2014

Ó Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, Hungary 2014

Abstract Although the world has experienced rapid urbanization, rural areas have always
been and are still an important research field in human geography. This paper performed a
bibliometric analysis on rural geography studies based on the peer-reviewed articles
concerning rural geography published in the SSCI-listed journals from 1990 to 2012. Our
analysis examines publication patterns (document types and publishing languages, article
outputs and their categories, major journals and their publication, most productive authors,
geographic distribution and international collaboration) and demonstrates the evolution of
intellectual development of rural geography by studying highly cited papers and their
citation networks and temporal evolution of keywords. Our research findings include: The
article number has been increasing since the 1900s, and went through three phases, and the
rural geography research is dominated in size by UK and USA. The USA is the most
productive in rural geography, but the UK had more impact than other countries in the
terms of the average citation of articles. Three distinct but loosely linked research streams
of rural geography were identified and predominated by the UK rural geographers. The
keywords frequencies evolved according to contexts of rural development and academic
advances of human geography, but they were loosely and scattered since the rural
researches in different regions or different systems faced with different problems.

Keywords Rural geography
Bibliometrics analysis
scientific visualization
Histcite

J. Wang
Z. Liu (&)

Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences,
Jia 11 Datun Road, Anwei, Beijing 100101, China
e-mail: liuzhigao@igsnrr.ac.cn
J. Wang
e-mail: wjy@igsnrr.ac.cn

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40 Scientometrics (2014) 101:39–59

Introduction

Rural geography itself has developed as a distinct sub-discipline of human geography since
the 1950s (Clout 1976; Woods 2005). However, it has been dialoguing with and learning
from the neighboring and related disciplines including society, agricultural economics,
planning, urban studies and others. Thanks to the blurring discipline boundary and
evolving academic and socio-economic contexts, it is difficult to give a universal definition
of rural geography. Many geographers put forward different descriptions for rural geog-
raphy, based on their own academic backgrounds. For example Hugh D Clout (Clout 1976)
suggested that rural geography should concentrate on the recent social, economic, land-use,
and spatial changes that have taken place in less-densely populated areas. However, Paul
Cloke outlined the scope of rural geography by defining the rurality. Matthew Tonts and
his colleagues argued that rural geography should pay much attention to the interaction of
economic, political, and social processes across space and time (Tonts et al. 2012).
The intellectual progress of rural geography is an important topic among the rural
geographers. Recently, they mainly focused on the evolution of its research fields (Lowe
et al. 2007; Roche 2003), the definition or redefinition of the rurality (Cloke 2006; Woods
2010), the future of rural geography (Woods 2009), the multifunctional rural geographies
(McCarthy 2005) and so on. Rural geography has thrived over the past two decades, driven
not only by the intellectual research tradition of this research community itself, but also by
the new advances of neighboring disciplines. Moreover, as the professorship and academic
leadership is taken over by new generations of scholars with fresh thoughts and methods
(e.g. Michael Woods took over the editorship of Journal of Rural Studies from Paul Cloke),
together with the changing social, economic, political, and ideological contexts in which
rural geographers are embedded, the objects of enquiry, and the conceptual and method-
ological tools rural geographers used vary through time (Marsden 1996). Although
‘‘conventional’’ themes such as rural settlement, urban–rural migration, rural land use
change, and geography of agriculture still remain important positions in contemporary
rural studies in general (Woods 2005), for under-urbanizing countries in particular, many
new issues have emerged as increasingly significant topics. These new research topics
include but are not limited to climate change (Woods 2012), environmental governance
and sustainability (Bowler et al. 2002), food supply and safety (Woods 2012), and rural
health (Kearns and Joseph 1997). Further, in post-fordism, post-industrial society, rural
social, economic and spatial restructuring, and functional transformation have become hot-
debated issues (Cloke and Goodwin 1992; McCarthy 2005). Thus, there is increasing
intuitive awareness of the necessity to trace the trajectory of the rural geography researches
(Woods 2010).
However, a manual compilation and comprehensive review of publications on this
rapid-moving research field seems to be impossible. This paper is hence interesting in
providing a longitudinal and systemic survey of rural geography using bibliometric
methods, which empirically complements the traditional narrative-based literature reviews
that are typically qualitative and largely based on personal judgment. Bibliometrics is the
application of mathematics and statistical methods to books and other media of commu-
nication (Pritchard 1969). As a quantitative method for literature analysis, bibliometrics
has been widely applied to assess research performance (Van Raan 1994) and research
impact (Glänzel and Moed 2002),as well to analyze development trajectories, emerging
trends and the knowledge structure of a given research field (Chen et al. 2012; Cruz and
Teixeira 2010). However, bibliometric analysis on rural geography research has not been
published as yet. Against this backdrop, this paper will present a comprehensive survey of

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rural geography research. More specifically, it aims to (1) identify significant publication
patterns such as temporal trends, document types, languages, major subject categories, and
journals; (2) quantify research performance and impact from multiple perspectives, such as
authors, institutions, countries, and journals; and (3) investigate the intellectual develop-
ment trajectory by visualizing the citation network of the core papers.
This study will be useful in the following aspects. Firstly, bibliometric analysis of the
contributions of researchers, institutions, and countries to this research area could provide
useful information on their research performance, aid prospective students and young
faculty in career planning. Secondly, the visualization of the core articles and their citation
relations could help the prospective students and young faculty in better understanding the
evolutionary trajectory of research areas. Thirdly, keyword analysis enables researchers to
identify research gaps and research frontiers, where they might contribute to this field.
The paper consists of four main sections as follows. In ‘‘Data and methodology’’ section
will describe the data and bibliometric analysis procedures used in the study. In ‘‘Methods
for data processing’’ section will present the analysis results from the following aspects:
document types and publishing languages, article outputs and their categories, major
journals and their publication, most-productive authors, geographic distribution and
international collaboration, highly cited papers and their citation networks and temporal
evolution of keywords. The final section contains concluding remarks about the outcomes
from this analysis and discussions on their implication for future rural geography.

Data and methodology

Although it is difficult to provide a distinct and definite concept of rural geography

research, its general features can be summarize from the following three aspects. Firstly,
the rural geography research takes rural (countryside or village) as the research object.
Secondly, it has always concerned with the geographical characteristics or spatial differ-
ences. Thirdly, it is interesting in human-environment interactions including agricultural
economy, rural settlement, social conflicts, land-use, urban–rural migration and other
issues. According to the above general features, we collected the appropriate articles for
further analysis as the following steps:
Database selection the bibliometric analysis data were extracted from the Social Sci-
ences Citation Index (SSCI) provided by Thomson Reuters’s Web of Science (WoS).
There are two reasons why we chose SSCI as data source. Firstly, the SSCI database, one
of the primary bibliographic databases produced by WoS, provides a comprehensive
coverage of the most important and influential research outputs of social sciences including
rural geography all over the world since the 1900 year. Secondly, it includes rich reference
information, enabling us to trace the intellectual development of the rural geography
research.
Subject categories selection each article in the Thomson Reuters Web of Knowledge
database is assigned to one or more subject categories, according to the journal in which it
was published. Under the subject classification system based on journal assignment, all
articles in a journal are assigned to the same subject category or categories (as some
journals are assigned to more than one category). For example, all articles published in the
‘‘Journal of Rural Studies’’ are assigned to two categories: (human) geography, planning
and development. Since the aim of this paper is to investigate the intellectual development
of rural geography, the retrieval categories were restricted to ‘‘(Human) Geography’’ and

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the closely related disciplines that rural geographers widely acknowledged, including
‘‘Sociology’’, ‘‘Economics’’, ‘‘Urban Studies’’, and ‘‘Planning & Development’’.
Search keywords selection the search terms ‘‘rural’, ‘countryside’, ‘village’ and their
variants were used as the topic search keywords to search titles, abstracts, or keywords in
the above subject categories. The wildcard character (*) was used to expand search terms.
The rural geography researches can be identified by using these topic search keywords in
the subject category of ‘‘Geography’’, however they might be not the appropriate keywords
to extract the rural geography publications from the other related categories. Therefore,
another group of the topic search keywords need to be used to further identify the rural
geography publications in other four subject categories such as ‘‘Sociology’’, ‘‘Econom-
ics’’, ‘‘Urban Studies’’, ‘‘Planning & Development’’. The additional topic search keywords
included ‘‘geography’’, ‘‘region’’, ‘‘space’’, ‘‘spatial’’, ‘‘area’’, ‘‘land’’ and their variants
(for example, ‘‘geograph*’’ as the variants of ‘‘geography’’), because rural geography is the
study of the geographical and spatial dimensions of rural areas-related issues. To avoid
confusion, the topic search keywords for retrieving publications in all subject categories is
referred to as ‘‘the first group of keywords’’ in this article, while the keywords that we used
later as ‘‘the second group of keywords’’.
Data retrieval and cleaning the data retrieval was performed within the SSCI databases
for the period 1900–2012 through the following steps. Firstly, the publications were
extracted according to the first group of topic keywords in each subject category separately
(Step 1 in Fig. 1). Secondly, we used the second group of keywords to collect the data in
the other four categories separately (Step 2). Thirdly, all search results were combined, and
the duplicate publications were removed (Step 3). A total of 8,455 publications were
identified with fifteen document types. Fourthly, since the major document type is peer-
reviewed journal articles, and they have references, which enable tracing of the intellectual
roots of the field under study, the bibliographic records of the 4,738 journal articles were
downloaded (Step 4). Information for individual articles, including journal titles, author
name(s) and affiliation(s), subject categories, and reference lists were downloaded. Finally,
in order to improve the credibility and validity of the research results, the data cleaning
were conducted (Step 5). The duplicate records were removed, the articles that are not the
rural geography research were deleted by examining their titles and abstracts, and the
different abbreviated forms were unified into one normal form by checking the authors’
names and their working units and addresses. The data collection and cleaning process was
outlined in Fig. 1, and the search results of each step were listed in Table 1.

Methods for data processing

There are many frequently-used bibliometric tools, and each has its own advantages and
drawbacks (Cobo et al. 2011). HistCiteTM was employed in this paper, which can down-
loaded from the website of Thomson Reuters (version 2012.03.17, the latest version free
available). This scientific visualization tool has strong advantages in not only evaluating
conveniently publication productivity and publication quality of individual authors, insti-
tutions, and countries by computing their publication numbers and citation stores, but also
in identifying the evolution of a research field based on the citation relation of most cited
papers (Garfield et al. 2006). HistCiteTM offers two distinct measures to calculate research
impact: Local Citation Score (LCS) and Global Citation Score (GCS). The former indicates
the number of times a paper is cited by other papers within the local collection, while the
latter represents the total number of citations to a paper in the entire WoS. Thus, LCS is

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SSCI database

Geography Related disciplines: Sociology, Economics, Urban

Studies, Planning & Development

Step 1: Searching by the first group of keywords

Step 1: Searching by
the first group of Step 2: Searching by the second group of keywords

Step 3: Combine search results and remove

Step 4: Refined by document types

Step 5: Data cleaning

Bibliometric analysis

Fig. 1 The working procedures of collecting the articles

Table 1 The search results of each working procedure

Step 1: The first Step 2: By the Step 3: Step 4: Refined Step 5:
group of second group of Combine by document Data
keywords keywords searching sets types cleaning

Geography 4,978 4,978 8,455 4,788 4,665

Sociology 6,532 1,019
Urban studies 1,042 471
Planning and 5,422 1,355
development
Economics 8,249 1,682

always a subset of GCS. HistCiteTM can produce a historiography, a chronological

network diagram of the most-cited articles in the collection, based on citation relations
(Garfield 2009).
Moreover, Citespace software, a freely available Java application for visualizing and
analyzing trends and patterns in scientific literature (Chen 2004), was employed as well to
process the data such as duplicate elimination, keywords analysis and so on. Netdraw
software was used to supports the visual exploration of collaboration networks. Note that
publications from Northern Ireland, England, Scotland, and Wales were re-grouped under
the United Kingdom (UK) heading. Publications originating from Hong Kong, Macao, or
Taiwan were not included in China.

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Empirical results

Document types and languages

Fifteen document types were identified among 8,455 publications on rural geography. The
most common document form is peer-reviewed journal articles (4,788), accounting for
56.6 % of the total. The second largest document form is book reviews (3,178), covering
37.7 %. The other significant document types included proceedings papers (260, 3.1 %),
editorial materials (163, 1.9 %), reviews (115, 1.4 %), and notes (89, 1.1 %). The
remaining publication forms were meeting abstracts (80), letters (11), discussions (11),
correction (6), correction additions (2), reprint (2), and book chapter (2).
As many bibliometric analyses, the subsequent analysis was delimited to the peer-reviewed
journal articles, because the journal articles are the most prevalent document type, and more
importantly, because they have references and keywords, which enable us to trace the intel-
lectual developments and to identify the changes in research topics. Consequently, the fol-
lowing analyses were based on the final data set of the 4,655 peer-reviewed journal articles.
Regarding publishing language, fourteen languages were found among the 4,655 journal
articles. The overwhelming majority of journal articles were published in English, 4,217,
accounting for more than 90 % of the 4,655 articles. This result reveals that English
remains the ‘official’ international academic communication language for rural geography
research. Note that the dominance of English is in part because the journals listed by the
WoS databases are overwhelmingly Anglo-centric. The other important languages inclu-
ded French (246, 5.27 %), Spanish (72, 1.54 %), German (75, 1.61 %), Russian (21,
0.45 %). A few articles were published in Czech (8), Croatian (7), Portuguese (7), Slovak
(4), Italian (2), Slovene (2), Slovenian (2), Catalan (1), and Lithuanian (1).

Article outputs and their categories

There has been a continuous and explosive increase in rural geography research since the
1960s, although a few articles were published previously, as shown in Fig. 2. The first
peer-reviewed article appeared in 1900 on Annales De Geographie, but the annual number
of published articles prior to the 1950s was below 10. Since the middle of 1960s, the
number of articles has been increasing (Fig. 2). According to the growth curve of rural
geography research, three stages can be identified as following:
(1) Prior to 1960s: The rural geography was in preparation. Although the clear definition
of rural geography was not put forward, some regional geographers, rural sociologist and
agricultural economists devoted themselves to rural studies and paid close attention to
spatial and geographical dimension of rural issues. The number of articles increased
slowly, and mostly articles published in the comprehensive journals including Geo-
graphical Journal. Geographical Review and Annales De Geographie etc.
(2) 1970–1980s: The rural geography was in rise. After the first book of rural geography
was produced by Hugh Clout in 1972, many foundational theories on rural geography
research were put forward during this period, including the conception of rurality. The
number of articles increased more rapidly than before, and more than 40 articles published
yearly during the late 1980s. The Journal of Rural Studies was issued in 1985 and edited by
the leading geographer Paul Cloke, which provided a good communication platform
among rural geographers. Moreover, we can clearly observe from Fig. 3 that rural geog-
raphy research became more multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary, and sociology and
economics became greater contributors to this field during this period.

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400
350

number of articles
300
250
200
150
100
50
0
1900
1905
1910
1915
1920
1925
1930
1935
1940
1945
1950
1955
1960
1965
1970
1975
1980
1985
1990
1995
2000
2005
2010
Fig. 2 The growth of rural geography research articles from 1990 to 2012

100%

90%

80%

70%

60%

50%

40%

30%

20%

10%

0%
1908
1912
1916
1920
1900
1904

1924
1928
1932
1936
1940
1944
1948
1952
1956
1960
1964
1968
1972
1976
1980
1984
1988
1992
1996
2000
2004
2008
2012

Geography Sociology Economics Urban Studies Planning & Development

Fig. 3 The percent of five related subject categories on rural geography articles

(3) After 1990s: The rural geography has rapidly increasing publications. Since the
1990s, rural issues has been one of the most significant concerns among policy-makers and
social scientists, and international and national geographical societies consequently
established academic communities to further promote research and education related to
rural landscapes, societies, and economies. For example, The IGU’s Study Group of ‘‘The
Sustainability of Rural Systems’’ was founded in 1992. Some nationwide geographical
societies including Association of American Geographers and the UK’s Royal Geo-
graphical Society and Chinese Geographical society, established specialty groups for rural
geography research. Along with the expansion of the SSCI database in general, the
establishment of related journals in particular, the number of rural geography articles
soared, increasing from 62 in 1991 to 346 in 2012. Moreover, rural geography research
during the time period became multi-disciplinary: economics, planning and development
made greater contribution than other disciplines.

Major journals and their publication

Consistent with observations in other research fields, rural geography articles appeared in a
wide range of journals, but were concentrated in major ones. Specifically, the 4,665 articles
were published in 478 SSCI journals. The top 30 active journals (6.28 % of 478 journals)

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published 2,221 (47.61 %) out of a total of 4,665 articles, while 291 journals (60.88 %)
published less than five articles separately. Table 2 lists the 30 most active SSCI journals in
rural geography research, along with the number of articles, the number of LCSs and GCSs
received. The major publication outlets for rural geography research included Journal of
Rural Studies, Rural Sociology, Landscape and Urban Planning, Sociologia Rurali, and
Environment and Planning A. In the Journal of Rural Studies, 312 articles, or 6.69 % out
of the 4,655 journals articles, were published, and received 1,291 LCSs and 4,870 GCSs.
The journal Rural Sociology ranked second in terms of publication numbers, with 138
published articles and 227 LCSs and 1833 GCSs. Moreover, as measured by the average
local citation score per article, Journal of Rural Studies was still ranked the first. All these

Table 2 The 30 most active scholarly journals in rural studies research

Journal name TA TA % LCSs GCSs

1 Journal of Rural Studies 312 6.69 1291 4870

2 Rural Sociology 138 2.96 227 1833
3 Landscape and Urban Planning 137 2.94 125 2006
4 Sociologia Ruralis 125 2.68 412 2035
5 Environment and Planning A 106 2.27 182 1190
6 World Development 105 2.25 226 2610
7 Annales De Geographie 102 2.19 11 98
8 Regional Studies 90 1.93 199 975
9 Etudes Rurales 84 1.80 0 17
10 Geoforum 76 1.63 67 529
11 Geography 73 1.56 52 196
12 Geographical Journal 69 1.48 25 314
13 Geographical Review 63 1.35 27 349
14 Journal of Development Studies 56 1.20 55 555
15 American Journal Of Agricultural Economics 55 1.18 115 791
16 Applied Geography 53 1.14 24 322
17 Area 46 0.99 80 470
18 Journal of Peasant Studies 46 0.99 19 227
19 Society and Natural Resources 46 0.99 44 465
20 Annals of The Association of American Geographers 44 0.94 41 437
21 Transactions of The Institute of British Geographers 44 0.94 119 526
22 Australian Geographer 43 0.92 71 317
23 Economic Geography 42 0.90 31 279
24 Agricultural Economics 39 0.84 44 436
25 Boletin De La Asociacion De Geografos Espanoles 39 0.84 3 6
26 Professional Geographer 39 0.84 15 353
27 Scottish Geographical Magazine 39 0.84 16 87
28 Economic And Political Weekly 37 0.79 5 190
29 Geografiska Annaler Series B-Human Geography 37 0.79 23 103
30 European Planning Studies 36 0.77 23 173

TA total number of articles, TA % the percentage in the 4,655 article, LCSs local citation scores, GCSs
global citation scores

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indicate that Journal of Rural Studies is the outstanding specialist journal in Rural
Research.

Most-prolific authors

The author productivity analysis revealed that a small group of prolific authors produced a
significant share of high-quality rural geography articles. Specifically, a total of 3,638
scholars (co)produced just one article, accounting for approximately 78 % of the total
authors, while merely 86 scholars (jointly) produced no less than 5 articles. Table 3 lists
the 20 most prolific authors, each with no less than 9 published articles. The most pro-
ductive author was Paul Cloke from Department of Geography, University of Exeter, UK,

Table 3 The 20 most-productive authors

Author The full name TA LCSs GCSs Institution
name

Cloke P Paul Cloke 30 267 706 Dept Geog, Univ Exeter, UK

Milbourne P Paul Milbourne 20 150 380 Sch City & Reg Planning, Cardiff Univ, UK
Marsden T Terry K. 19 172 835 Sustainable Pl Res Inst, Cardiff Univ, UK
Marsden
Little J Little Jo 17 153 407 Dept Geog, Univ Exeter, UK
Demangeon Albert 14 7 48 Paris Univ, French
A Demangeon
Ilbery B Brian Ilbery 13 36 182 Countryside & Community Res Inst, Univ
Gloucestershire, UK
Joseph AE Alun E. Joseph 12 42 200 Dept Geog, Univ Guelph, Canada
Lowe P 12 43 254 Ctr Rural Econ, Sch Agr Food & Rural Dev,
Newcastle Univ, UK
Shucksmith Mark 11 44 155 Newcastle Univ, Sch Architecture Planning &
M Shucksmith Landscape, UK
Argent N Neil Argent 10 32 132 Univ New England, Sch Behav Cognit & Social
Sci, Australia.
Hoggart K Keith Hoggart 10 33 75 Dept Geog,Kings Coll London, UK
Roberts D Deborah 10 19 69 Univ Aberdeen, Sch Business, UK
Roberts
Ward N Neil Ward 10 37 167 Univ E Anglia, Fac Social Sci, UK
Kilkenny M Maureen 9 43 127 Natl Ctr Food & Agr Policy, USA
Kilkenny
Rigg J Jonathan Rigg 9 28 171 Dept Geog, Univ Durham, UK
Smailes PJ Peter J. 9 37 89 Univ Adelaide, Dept Geog, Australia
Smailes
Stockdale A Aileen 9 53 141 Queens Univ Belfast, Inst Spatial & Environm
Stockdale Planning, UK
Woods M Michael 9 38 169 Aberystwyth Univ, Inst Geog & Earth Sci, UK
Woods
Yarwood R Richard 9 16 66 Univ Plymouth, Sch Geog Earth & Environm Sci,
Yarwood UK
Zhang XB Xiaobo Zhang 9 21 239 Int Food Policy Res Inst, USA

TA total number of articles, LCSs local citation scores, GCSs global citation scores

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with 30 articles, 267 LCSs and 706 GCSs. Other prolific authors included Paul Milbourne,
Terry K. Marsden, Little Jo, and so on (see Table 3).
Because the affiliation of some productive scholars changed over the past decades, the
validity of information on their institutional affiliation was guarantee merely at the end of
March, 2013 where the data were collected. More interestingly, the vast majority of the 20
most productive researchers come largely from Anglo-American institutions. Specifically,
14 productive authors serviced in UK, 2 in USA, 2 in Australia, 1 in Canada, 1 in French.
Merely one productive author was from non-English speaking countries (Albert Deman-
geon from France). The geographical distribution on the affiliated institutions of the most
productive authors reveals that English-speaking countries dominated this research field.

Geographic distribution and international collaboration

The 4,655 rural geography research articles were geographically distributed very unevenly
but concentrated in several leading countries. Concretely speaking, 118 countries/territo-
ries contributed to rural geography research, however merely 25 countries/territories
(21.2 % of the total) produced over 30 articles, 58 countries/territories (49.2 % the total)
published less than 5 articles, and 33 countries/territories (28.0 %) produced only one
paper. USA was the most prolific country with 1,288 articles, followed by UK (1,029),
Canada (259) and Australia (259). Other productive countries included China (172),
Netherlands (168), France (150), Spain (138), and Germany (135). Among the top 25
prolific countries, 8 countries take English as the official language or the primary language.
Among them, the top 4 countries are all English-speaking, their output together accounted
for 2,385 articles, 58.2 % of the total. More interesting, China, India and South Africa that
are all undergoing rapidly urbanization were ranked among the top 25 productive countries
of rural geography research (see Table 4).
Interestingly, the USA was the most prolific country, with 1,288 articles, and received
the largest GCSs (14,830); However, UK received the largest LCSs (2,455), and had the
largest average citation rate of GCS (2.39) and LCS (12.21). On the whole, USA is the
most productive in rural geography, but UK had more impact than other countries in the
terms of the average citation per article and total local citation scores, illustrating that UK
rural geography research enjoyed highest research quality (Kurtz and Craig 2009). Aus-
tralia and Canada were the third productive country, each with 259 articles, followed by
China (172), Netherlands (168), France (150), Spain (138), and Germany (135).
The institutional distribution of rural geography research was also geographically
uneven. A total of 4,655 articles were distributed over 2,004 research institutions, however,
1,286 institution, or 64 % out of the total institutions produced only one article. Table 5
lists the 40 most productive institutions, each with not less than 20 articles. The World
Bank was the most productive institution with 77 articles, followed by University of
Wisconsin (61), University of Aberdeen (56), and University of Guelph (42). It is worth
noting that the overwhelming majority of the 40 most productive research institutions all
were Anglo-American countries. University of Aberdeen had the highest impact within the
rural geography research, measured by LCSs, followed by University of Bristol, University
of Wales and University of Wales College of Cardiff. However, the World Bank received
the largest GCSs, followed by University of Wisconsin, and University of Wales College
of Cardiff. The most productive and highest impact institutions were largely from UK and
USA: 18 institutions from UK and 15 institutions from USA, illustrating that UK and USA
are the leading countries in rural geography research.

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Scientometrics (2014) 101:39–59 49

Table 4 The top 25 productive countries of rural geography studies

Country TA TA % LCSs GCSs TLCS/TA TGCS/TA

1 USA 1288 26.4 1443 14830 1.12 11.51

2 UK 1029 21.1 2455 12569 2.39 12.21
3 Australia 259 5.3 285 2352 1.10 9.08
4 Canada 259 5.3 298 2,246 1.15 8.67
5 China 172 3.5 104 1,047 0.61 6.09
6 Netherlands 168 3.4 184 1,978 1.10 11.78
7 France 150 3.1 126 883 0.84 5.89
8 Spain 138 2.8 39 746 0.28 5.41
9 Germany 135 2.8 69 1,107 0.51 8.20
10 India 78 1.6 8 301 0.11 3.86
11 Sweden 76 1.6 39 398 0.52 5.23
12 South Africa 60 1.2 15 271 0.25 4.52
13 New Zealand 58 1.2 126 694 2.18 11.96
14 Italy 57 1.2 48 498 0.85 8.73
15 Japan 53 1.1 23 318 0.44 6.00
16 Belgium 48 1.0 26 348 0.55 7.25
17 Russia 44 0.9 14 102 0.31 2.31
18 Norway 44 0.9 54 386 1.22 8.78
19 Denmark 42 0.9 26 197 0.63 4.69
20 Ireland 42 0.9 82 509 1.95 12.13
21 Greece 38 0.8 40 316 1.06 8.31
22 Austria 32 0.7 7 235 0.21 7.36
23 Czech Republic 32 0.7 15 71 0.48 2.22
24 Finland 32 0.7 31 187 0.97 5.83
25 Israel 30 0.6 9 148 0.31 4.92
TA total number of articles, TA % the percentage in the 4,655 article, LCSs local citation scores, GCSs
global citation scores

Figure 4 represent visually collaboration network between the top 40 productive

research institutions of rural geography research. The cross-national collaboration fre-
quencies of these productive institutions were lower than 5 times. The World Bank is at the
center of the collaboration network, suggesting that the experts at this international
organization have frequently collaborated with other institutions. The largest collaboration
frequencies occurred between Chinese Academic Sciences and University of California
Davis, revealing that scholars from the two institutions frequently communicated. These
highly collaborative institutions came largely from USA and UK. Moreover, the American
institutions were more open than their oversea counterparts.

Highly cited papers and their citation networks

We employed HitstCiteTM to visualize the intellectual evolution of rural geography

research, based on the 60 most-cited articles’ citation relation in the collection (see Fig. 5).
In this LCS historiography, each node represents one most highly cited article, and the
links indicate the citation relations between both ends. The direction of an arrow indicates

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Table 5 The Top 40 productive research institutions of rural geography research

Institution Recs LCSs GCSs

1 World Bank, USA 77 119 993

2 University of Wisconsin, USA 61 118 894
3 University of Aberdeen, UK 56 190 650
4 University of Guelph, Canada 42 77 371
5 Pennsylvania State University, USA 39 76 532
6 Ohio State University, USA 39 53 434
7 Michigan State University, USA 39 66 506
8 Cornell University, USA 37 41 453
9 International Food Policy Research Institute, USA 31 34 605
10 University of Cambridge, UK 32 59 295
11 University of Exeter, UK 33 100 377
12 University of Manchester, UK 30 22 239
13 University of California Berkeley, USA 28 15 346
14 University of New England, UK 28 47 236
15 University of Oxford, UK 28 26 228
16 University of Missouri, USA 27 24 180
17 University College London, UK 27 26 230
18 University of Melbourne, Australia 26 15 168
19 University of Durham, UK 25 41 321
20 University of East Anglia, UK 25 25 475
21 University of Colorado, USA 24 21 277
22 University of Kentucky, USA 26 27 256
23 University of Wales, UK 24 132 452
24 Cardiff University, UK 23 93 355
25 University of Queensland, Australia 24 31 247
26 University of Sussex, UK 28 20 264
27 University of Bristol, UK 29 164 484
28 University of California Davis, USA 29 13 169
29 University of North Carolina, USA 24 17 200
30 University of Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK 22 79 333
31 University of Sheffield, UK 22 66 325
32 Australian National University, Australia 21 18 200
33 University of Illinois, USA 21 33 228
34 University of Reading, UK 21 16 123
35 Wageningen University, Netherlands 21 10 113
36 Monash University, Australia 20 21 199
37 Queen’s University Belfast, UK 20 26 210
38 University of Adelaide, Australia 20 65 218
39 Wageningen University and Research Center, Netherlands 20 58 727
40 University of Wales College of Cardiff, UK 20 120 738
TA total number of articles, TA % the percentage in the 4,655 article, LCSs local citation scores, GCSs
global citation scores

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Scientometrics (2014) 101:39–59 51

Table 6 The top 60 most cited articles

Records Article Informaiton Country LCSs GCSs Stream

708 Cloke P, 1977, Regional Studies, V11, P31 UK 21 73 A

1088 Cloke P, 1986, Regional Studies, V20, P289 UK 26 61
1164 Hoggart K, 1988, Area, V20, P35 UK 13 20
1605 Halfacree Kh, 1995, Journal of Rural Studies, V11, UK 46 115
P1
1607 Jones O, 1995, Journal of Rural Studies, V11, P35 UK 25 66
1756 Beggs Jj, 1996, Rural Sociology, V61, P306 Canada 15 64
1931 Milbourne P, 1998, Journal of Rural Studies, V14, UK 13 20
P167
2124 Liepins R, 2000, Journal of Rural Studies, V16, P23 New Zealand 15 59
2208 Smith Md, 2000, Rural Sociology, V65, P396 USA 18 90
2360 Smith Dp, 2001, Journal of Rural Studies, V17, P457 UK 22 52
1036 Cloke P, 1985, Geography, V70, P13 UK 13 27 B
1078 Newby H, 1986, Regional Studies, V20, P209 UK 16 46
1105 Cloke P, 1987, Journal of Rural Studies, V3, P321 UK 27 50
1106 Little J, 1987, Journal of Rural Studies, V3, P335 UK 17 37
1389 Cloke P, 1992, Journal of Rural Studies, V8, P359 UK 22 56
1432 Phillips M, 1993, Journal of Rural Studies, V9, P123 UK 39 88
1506 Halfacree Kh, 1994, Sociol Ruralis, V34, P164 UK 30 76
1511 Murdoch J, 1994, Journal of Rural Studies, V10, P83 UK 22 42
1627 Bell D, 1995, Journal of Rural Studies, V11, P113 UK 21 64
1693 Halfacree Kh, 1996, Antipode, V28, P42 UK 15 56
1718 Little J, 1996, Journal of Rural Studies, V12, P101 UK 54 113
1795 Cloke P, 1997, Transactions of The Institute of UK 16 33
British Geographers, V22, P210
1824 Valentine G, 1997, Journal of Rural Studies, V13, UK 29 91
P137
1935 Bessiere J, 1998, Sociol Ruralis, V38, P21 France 15 106
1989 Phillips M, 1998, Journal of Rural Studies, V14, UK 15 23
P427
2139 Bryden J, 2000, Agricultural Economics, V22, P185 UK 14 28
2154 Matthews H, 2000, Journal of Rural Studies, V16, UK 29 69
P141
2268 Curry Gn, 2001, Australian Geographer, V32, P109 Australia 15 34
2386 Phillips M, 2002, Transactions of The Institute of UK 15 43
British Geographers, V27, P282
2600 Terluin Ij, 2003, Journal of Rural Studies, V19, P327 Netherlands 20 70
2722 Ghose R, 2004, Urban Geography, V25, P528 USA 17 35
1337 Cloke P, 1992, Transactions of The Institute of UK 33 99 C
British Geographers, V17, P321
1446 Knight J, 1993, Cambridge Journal of Economics, UK 13 39
V17, P195
1451 Lowe P, 1993, Journal of Rural Studies, V9, P205 UK 20 97

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Table 6 continued
Records Article Informaiton Country LCSs GCSs Stream

1642 Keeble D, 1995, Urban Studies, V32, P975 UK 22 58

1647 Marsden T, 1995, Journal of Rural Studies, V11, UK 14 46
P285
1665 Cloke P, 1995, Journal of Rural Studies, V11, P351 UK 21 40
1668 Johnson Jd, 1995, Journal of Rural Studies, V11, USA 14 47
P405
1699 Woodward R, 1996, Journal of Rural Studies, V12, UK 13 28
P55
1835 Reardon T, 1997, World Development, V25, P735 USA 21 184
1836 Murdoch J, 1997, Area, V29, P109 UK 13 44
1906 Goodwin M, 1998, Journal of Rural Studies, V14, P5 UK 22 76
1912 Marsden T, 1998, Journal of Rural Studies, V14, UK 32 95
P107
1941 Kilkenny M, 1998, Journal of Regional Science, USA 15 46
V38, P293
1978 Shucksmith M, 1998, Sociol Ruralis, V38, P225 UK 14 38
2091 Marsden T, 1999, Sociol Ruralis, V39, P501 UK 26 96
2123 Grimes S, 2000, Journal of Rural Studies, V16, P13 Ireland 14 42
2127 Gray J, 2000, Sociol Ruralis, V40, P30 Australia 13 45
2164 Renkow M, 2000, Journal of Regional Science, V40, USA 14 48
P261
2217 Murdoch J, 2000, Journal of Rural Studies, V16, UK 28 126
P407
2221 Marsden T, 2000, Sociol Ruralis, V40, P424 UK 13 118
2225 Knickel K, 2000, Sociol Ruralis, V40, P512 Germany 19 71
2282 Reardon T, 2001, World Development, V29, P395 USA 26 100
2305 Deller Sc, 2001, American Journal of Agricultural USA 27 141
Economics, V83, P352
2445 Neal S, 2002, Ethnic and Racial Studies, V25, P442 UK 13 44
2553 Renting H, 2003, Environment and Planning A, V35, Netherlands 16 176
P393
2626 Paquette S, 2003, Journal of Rural Studies, V19, Canada 15 34
P425
2661 Goodman D, 2004, Sociol Ruralis, V44, P3 USA 14 110
2944 Rigg J, 2006, World Development, V34, P180 UK 21 119
2968 Holmes J, 2006, Journal of Rural Studies, V22, P142 Australia 18 106

that the article at the end of the arrow is cited by the article at the origin of the arrow. The
size of each circular node is proportional to the LCSs that the associated article received.
The larger a circle is, the more citations score the paper has received in the collection.
Figure 2 displays the linkages among the 60 most-cited articles based on their LCS and
Table 3 lists the top 60 most cited articles, along with local and global citation scores they
received.

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 Table 7 The top 30 high frequency author keywords

1991-1995 1996-2000 2001-2005 2006-2010 2011-2012 1991-2012

Category Keywords
Frequency Rank Frequency Rank Frequency Rank Frequency Rank Frequency Rank Frequency Rank
Rural 8 1 26 1 35 1 99 1 71 1 239 1
Rural Development 5 2 20 2 24 2 95 2 43 3 187 2
Poverty 3 4 8 5 18 4 50 4 27 5 106 4
Migration 3 4 9 4 19 3 39 5 33 4 103 5
Agriculture 3 4 6 8 6 12 27 6 13 7 55 6
Urbanization 2 11 7 6 11 6 23 7 11 10 54 7
Scientometrics (2014) 101:39–59

Landscape 1 15 4 11 7 10 21 9 12 9 45 8
Land 1 15 1 26 7 10 21 9 13 7 43 9
Gender 1 15 3 17 6 12 20 12 11 10 41 11
Rural Livelihoods 0 22 0 28 5 17 21 9 14 6 40 12
Subject areas Rural Community 3 4 2 20 9 7 17 14 9 14 40 13
Rural Tourism 1 15 4 11 5 17 23 7 5 21 38 14
Rural Restructuring 4 3 2 20 8 8 8 22 7 15 29 16
Rurality 1 15 4 11 6 12 11 17 5 21 27 17
Sustainability 1 15 3 17 5 17 14 16 2 26 25 19
Employment 3 4 2 20 6 12 7 25 3 25 21 22
Conservation 2 11 6 9 1 30 10 20 2 26 21 23
Education 2 11 0 28 5 17 8 22 5 21 20 24
Governance 0 22 0 28 6 12 7 25 6 20 19 25
Countryside 0 22 2 20 2 29 10 21 5 21 19 26
GIS 0 22 4 11 4 24 2 30 7 15 17 27
Planning 3 4 2 20 5 17 5 29 1 28 16 29
China 3 4 12 3 18 4 51 3 46 2 131 3
Africa 0 22 5 10 8 8 20 12 10 12 43 10
India 1 15 3 17 5 17 16 15 7 15 32 15
Geographical Asia 0 22 7 6 5 17 8 22 7 15 27 18
areas Australia 0 22 2 20 4 24 11 17 7 15 24 20
Mexico 0 22 4 11 3 26 6 28 10 12 23 21
Scotland 2 11 4 11 3 26 7 25 1 28 17 28
Spain 0 22 1 26 3 26 11 17 1 28 16 30
-
Note: *keep ranking, marked with light grey; +ranking up, marked with deep grey; ranking down, with no mark.
53

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54 Scientometrics (2014) 101:39–59

Fig..4 The network of top 40 collaboration institutions in rural geography research. Notes: the size of each
node corresponds to network eigen value centrality in the collaboration network and tie strengthen
represents amount of papers co-signed by a pair of institutions

Three distinct but loosely linked research streams were identified among the most 60
highly cited papers in the LCS historiography. The research stream A focused on the
definition of the ‘‘rural’’. It started with Cloke’s (1977) paper in Regional Studies. This
groundbreaking paper formulated an index of rurality using principal components analysis
to define rurality. Cloke’s (1986) paper further developed his earlier study on the rurality
index and discussed the changing nature of rurality itself. It is worth noting that the most
highly cited paper in this research stream was Halfacre’s (1995) paper. It received 46 LCSs
and 115 GLCs. In this paper, Halfacre developed a social representation approach to
conceptualizing the rural and defined ‘the rural’ as a ‘social representation’, a set of highly
contextualised rules and resources. Jones’ (1995) paper explained how and why lay dis-
courses were being used in academic approaches to the rural. Smith’ (2001) paper re-
affirmed the value of viewing the rural as a socio-cultural construct, tied to place and time,
which is specific to individuals and social groups. Stream A provided the conceptual
framework for the other two streams, which engaged in the evolution of rural conceptions
according to the intellectual development. From this sense, other twom research streams
provided the empirical materials, and supported and impacted the theatrical developments
of rural geography research.
The second stream (Stream B, coloured in red) adopted social and cultural approaches
to various rural problems, including rural stratum differentiation, outmigration, poverty,
gender relation, and the nature of rural childhood, etc. It started in 1987 with two articles.
This first highly cited paper in this research stream was Cloke’s (1987) paper and pointed
out that intra-class conflict was a significant force in the economic, social and cultural
constitution of rural areas. The second highly cited paper was Little’s (1987) paper, and
examined the influence of the characteristics of rural areas including size, remoteness, and
resource availability on women’s participation in rural economy production. In Little’s
(1996) paper, Litter further investigated the role of the rural idyll in maintaining rural

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Scientometrics (2014) 101:39–59 55

Fig..5 citation network of the 60 most highly cited papers within the whole dataset. Note: the nodes
represent the most-cited articles and the links indicate the citation relations between both ends. The direction
of an arrow indicates that the article at the end of the arrow is cited by the article at the origin of the arrow.
The list number in each node is the serial number of the records in database, and the detail information of the
node number list in Table 6

gender relations, based on interviews with women in rural Avon in the south west of
England. Phillips’ (1993) paper investigated the commonalities and differences between
rural and urban gentrification. Bell’s (1995) paper examined the experiences of gays and
lesbians in rural communities. Based on interviews in a village in UK, Valentine’s (1997)
paper explored the imagining of the countryside as an idealised place for rural childhood.
Valentine’s (1997) article was cited by Matthews’s (2000) paper, and the latter discussed
the socio-spatial exclusion of rural children, using the survey materials in rural North-
amptonshire, England.
The third research stream (Stream C, coloured in yellow) concentrated on economic
development and agricultural production of rural areas. This research stream involved the
conceptualization of the new developments of rural functions, and new theories such as
‘network’, ‘embeddedness’, ‘post-productivist’ and ‘multifunctional’ were imported to
explain the changes in rural functions. This research stream began with Cloke’s (1992)
paper, which argued economic restructuring and social recomposition in rural area. It
received 33 LCSs and 99 GCSs. Lowe’s (1993) paper quantified the extent to which the

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rural poor in Indian dry areas benefited from common property resources in farming
systems. Marsden had two highly cited papers in this stream, and they reconceptualized the
new characteristics of uneven development of rural activities, and argued that rural areas
during 1980-90 s were being transformed into a post-productionist countryside. Murdoch’s
(2000) paper introduced the network concept for understanding diverse forms of rural
development. Holmes’ (2000) paper was founded on this stream, and scrutinized the
concept of multifunctional transition in rural Australia.
There are four points worth noting in this LCS historiography. Firstly, eight out of the
60 most cited articles were contributed by Paul Cloke, the founding editor of the Journal of
Rural Studies. This indicates that Paul Cloke is one most influential scholar in contem-
porary rural geography research. Secondly, Journal of Rural Studies had the highest
number of highly cited papers (26, 43.33 %), suggesting that this journal is the dominant
publication outlet for high quality works on rural geography. Thirdly, two-thirds of the 60
most cited articles were published by UK authors, and the remaining came from USA,
Australia, Canada, and New Zealand etc. It verified again that the UK was the leading
nation in this research field. Finally, there were several unconnected points in the citation
network, since they were not cited by the other high citation articles.

Temporal evolution of keywords

As keywords are carriers of the research focuses and core contents of individual articles, a
keyword analysis was performed to reveal the changes in research topics of rural geog-
raphy research from 1991 to 2011. Thomson Reuters’s Web of Science provides two
alternatives for the selection of keywords: the original keywords provided by authors
(author keywords) and the indexing keywords provided by WoS (‘‘Keywords Plus’’). We
used author keywords to monitor the changes in research topics. Note that author keywords
of articles that were published before 1990 are not completely provided in the WoS system,
thus our keyword analysis was confined to the post-1990 rural geography articles. 3,447
articles were published after 1990, covering 72 % of the total articles.
A total of 5,630 unique author keywords were extracted from the post-1990 peer-
reviewed articles, with 12,078 occurrences. However, the occurrence frequency of key-
words was highly uneven. Specifically, 3,850 keywords or 68.3 % of the total appeared
only one time, and 152 or 2.8 % of the total occurred more than ten times. Table 5 lists the
top 30 frequently used keywords within each 5 year intervals during the period 1991-2012.
The top 30 high frequency keywords were used 1,518 times, accounting for 12.57 % of the
total keyword appearance frequencies.
Not surprisingly, the keywords, such as ‘‘rural’’, ‘‘land’’ and ‘‘countryside’’, were
ranked on this list, because they were the search keywords we used. However, ‘‘village’’,
‘‘geography’’, ‘‘region’’, ‘‘space’’, ‘‘spatial’’ and ‘‘area’’, which were also used as search
terms, were not listed among the top 30 high frequency keywords.
The top 30 high frequency keywords could be divided into two groups. One group is to
subject areas that were used to represent the research topics of the articles, and the other
one is geographical areas that remarked the study areas of the articles. Regarding the
subject areas, besides the searching words, ‘‘rural development’’ was on the list of the top
30 high frequency keywords, since this term has different connotations that can be
understood in different perspectives. The following keywords, such as ‘‘poverty’’,
‘‘migration’’, ‘‘agriculture’’ and ‘‘urbanization’’, were important rural development
research topics for any region of the world, thus they became the high frequency keywords.
The ‘‘land’’ and ‘‘landscape’’ ranked the 8th and 9th of the top 30, which vividly reflected

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the rural changes and carried the ‘‘multifunctionality’’ of rural areas. Regarding the
research regions, ‘‘China’’ was the highest frequency keywords, followed by ‘‘Africa’’,
‘‘India’’, and ‘‘Asia’’, suggesting that ongoing rapid urbanization regions became hot
research areas in international academic community of rural geography research. The
remaining geographical areas such as ‘‘Australia’’, ‘‘Scotland’’, and ‘‘Spain’’ are developed
countries with high urbanization level.
However, the keywords frequencies varied over time and geographical contexts,
because the rural scholars in different regions and historical contexts were faced with
different problems. However, from the list of the top 30 high frequency author keywords,
we can find out that there were three trends regarding the temporal evolution of keywords.
Firstly, the keywords frequencies ranked up remarkably, such as rural livelihoods,
urbanization, landscape, and ‘‘China’’. Secondly, some keywords kept constantly high
frequencies, they included ‘‘rural’’, ‘‘rural development’’, ‘‘poverty’’, ‘‘migration’’ and
‘‘agriculture’’ etc. Thirdly, about one third of the top keywords dropped in ranking such as
‘‘rural community’’, ‘‘employment’’, ‘‘education’’ and ‘‘Scotland’’.

Conclusions

This paper examined quantitatively the publication patterns of rural geography research
using the well-established bibliometric techniques, based on the peer-reviewed articles,
which were downloaded from the Web of Science in period of 1900–2012. By this ana-
lysis, we tracked the intellectual developments of the rural geography research, based the
citation relations linkages among the 60 most cited articles in the LCS historiography. Our
major research findings include:
(1) In total, 4,665 peer-reviewed journal articles were published during the period from
1900 to 2011, 90.40 % of them were in English. The article number has been
increasing since the 1960s, and went through three development phases, suggesting
that rural geography is still one important research field in the constantly urbanized
world that was largely by China, India and South Africa. According to the subject
category distribution, rural geography research has become interdisciplinary and
multidisciplinary.
(2) Rural geography research was dominated by UK and USA. The most-prolific and
highly cited authors and institutions are mostly from these two countries. Journal of
Rural Studies ranked first among active journals, and Paul Cloke was most prolific
author. USA was the most productive in rural geography research, but UK had more
impact than USA in the terms of the average citation frequency of a paper. However,
from the perspective of research collaboration network, the American institutions
were more open than their overseas competitor.
(3) Three distinct but loosely linked research streams were identified. The first research
stream focused on the definition of the ‘‘rural’’ and was earliest formed, the second
stream adopted social and cultural approaches to various rural problems, and the
third stream concentrated on the economic development and agricultural production
in rural areas. We find that from the citation relation of the 60 most-cited articles

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that the scholars from UK contributed most to the high cited rural geography
research outputs.
(4) The author keyword frequencies revealed that the‘‘rural development’’,‘‘poverty’’,
‘‘migration’’, ‘‘agriculture’’ and ‘‘urbanization’’ were the common but important
issues of rural geography research. The rapidly urbanizing countries such as China,
India and Africa have become increasingly important contributors to this field. The
keywords frequencies have varied over time and space because rural geography
research topics were influenced not only by the advances from its neighbouring and
related subjects, and the evolving and region-specific socio-economic and institu-
tional conditions in which rural scholars were embedded.

Discussions

Although the contemporary world is undergoing urbanization at an unprecedented speed

and scale, largely driven by developing and emerging countries, and as of 2012, 3.64
billion, 52 percent of the total population of the world live in cities or towns. It does
however not imply that rural area became of less importance to human society in this
rapidly urbanizing world. Indeed rural areas generate an overwhelming majority of agri-
cultural and food products, countless craft products, provide a great deal of employment
opportunities and social wealth (economic function), maintain diverse landscapes and
ecosystem services for the whole society (ecosystem and environmental function), and are
important recreational areas and second homes for city residents (culture-social and resi-
dent functions). Especially, under increasing pressure of food security and the combat to
climate change, the future of rural space has received renewed attention (Woods 2012).
Thus, rural areas have always been an important research topic in social sciences, par-
ticularly human geography and related academic disciplines. This implies that more
research resources should be put to further promote rural geography research.
Rural geography has received increasing attention from various subjects over the past
century and rural geography research has become multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary.
Scientists from many different disciplines, including but not limited to economics, human
geography, planning, urban studies, environmental studies, have taken an active part in
rural geography research. The different disciplines provided not only theoretical knowl-
edge and methodological tools to and explain the various rural changes and problems, but
also guidance on the design of the general institutional framework as well as concrete
action plans to promote rural transformation and development. Considering the complexity
and diversity of rural problems, multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary cooperation should
be encouraged.
In addition, because the rural developments and changes of particular regions are
influenced to a given degree by other regions and some topics such as global climate
change, food security, environmental pollution and ecological degradation, become global
concerns, rural geography research should be increasing internationalized, namely,
scholars from different countries need to strengthen dialogue and cooperation. Indeed,
Anglo-American rural geographers began played more attention to the rural area issues of
developing countries, meanwhile the rural researchers from emerging countries actively
collaborated with their western colleagues. The most remarkable cooperation is between
China and USA. We strongly believe that such collaborations will enhance the theoretical
development of the whole rural geography research.

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Scientometrics (2014) 101:39–59 59

Acknowledgments The authors gratefully acknowledge financial support from several sources: the
National Natural Science Foundation of China (41130748, 41201116, and 41101165), Beijing Municipal
Natural Science Foundation (9142007), The Importation and Development of High-Caliber Talents Project
of Beijing Municipal Institutions (CIT&TCD201404090), Tourism Young Expert Training Program of
China National Tourism Administration (TYETP201304).

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