Global industrial park research trends: a bibliometric analysis from 1987 to 2016

Industrial parks, which are characterized as a group of industrial businesses designed to meet the concomitant demands of different organizations within an area, have played an important role in the national development strategies of many countries. Industrial parks have received increasingly more attention over time. Nevertheless, few scholars have visually analyzed global scientific data. This paper quantitatively and visually examines global academic research papers on industrial parks from 1987 to 2016 by using a bibliometric analysis. A total of 1823 papers from Science Citation Index Expanded and Social Sciences Citation Index databases were analyzed. The distributions of authorship, keywords, countries/territories, and institutes were generated. According to data from Science Citation Index Expanded and Social Sciences Citation Index databases, the top five most productive authors (i.e., Geng Y. with 22 articles, Fujita T. with 17, El-Halwagi M.M. with 15, Zhang Y. with 14, and Tan R.R. with 12) have contributed significantly to industrial park research. Papers on industrial park research have mainly been from China, the USA, and Taiwan. The dominant keywords from industrial park research from 1987 to 2016 are "China", "system", "heavy metal", and "eco-industrial park". These keywords will be the hot topics in industrial park research in the future. The research findings can provide a reference for understanding the research development process and trends in analyses in the field of industrial parks.