Sponge City — An emerging concept in sustainable water resource management: A scientometric analysis

Abstract

‘Sponge City’ is managing stormwater through increased infiltration, detention, storage, treatment, and drainage. By implementing this concept, the impact of urban development on water-related problems and natural ecosystems is diminished. This scientometric study analyze the global articles on ‘Sponge City’ which have been indexed in the Clarivate Analytics. A total of 199 articles were analyzed for visualization of the sponge city researches. China, as the stabilizer of the issue, has the highest betweenness centrality (1.37). The analysis of keyword co-occurrence and Clarivate Analytics category showed that the trend of the field is gradually shifting to managerial and practical phases. Based on co-citation and bibliographic coupling, the principal authors and resources have not been recognized yet. More research should be done to form the main paths of bibliographic entities. Generally, this scientometric analysis may help practitioners, policymakers, funders, editors, and researchers to understand the current state of the field and serve as a turning point for future progress in the studies.

Keywords

• CiteSpace
• Network analysis
• Scientometric
• Sponge city
• Urban water management