Knowledge Domain and Emerging Trends of Intelligent Green Building and Smart City - A Visual Analysis Using CiteSpace

As the concept of sustainability becomes more and more popular, a large amount of literature have been recorded recently on intelligent green building and smart city (IGB&SC). It is therefore needed to systematically analyse the existing knowledge structure as well as the future new development of this domain through the identification of the thematic trends, landmark articles, typical keywords together with co-operative researchers. In this paper, Citespace software package is applied to analyse the citation networks and other relevant data of the past eleven years (from 2006 to 2016) collected from Web of Science (WOS). Through this, a series of professional document analysis are conducted, including the production of core authors, the influence made by the most cited authors, keywords extraction and timezone analysis, hot topics of research, highly cited papers and trends with regard to co-citation analysis, etc. As a result, the development track of the IGB&SC domains is revealed and visualized and the following results reached: (i) in the research area of IGB&SC, the most productive researcher is Winters JV and Caragliu A is most influential on the other hand; (ii) different focuses of IGB&SC research have been emerged continually from 2006 to 2016 e.g. smart growth, sustainability, smart city, big data, etc.; (iii) Hollands's work is identified with the most citations and the emerging trends, as revealed from the bursts analysis in document co-citations, can be concluded as smart growth, the assessment of intelligent green building and smart city.