Critical review
A literature review on accessibility using bibliometric analysis techniques

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Abstract

Accessibility is a key concept in the field of transportation, and there is a rich amount of reviews available on this topic which concentrate on certain perspectives. However, none of them presents a comprehensive and quantitative overview on accessibility-related publications. To fill this gap, this study reviewed two decades of publications (during 2000–2019) drawn from Web of Science (WoS), and aims to figure out the evolution pathway of accessibility related studies so that future research directions can be recognized. By employing the bibliometric analysis techniques, this study provides the potential to trace historical and geographic trends at global level, covering leading journals and institutions, keywords characteristics, citation network analysis, and a qualitative review of the most influential papers. The output results show that there is an increasing geographic spread along with the growth spurt of research publications on the topic of accessibility especially since 2010s. Both the keywords' characteristics and citation network analysis help to identify research hot points, categorized as new indicators development and accessibility-based applications. Finally, this paper highlights the need for further studies for those two hot points respectively. It is hoped the results output here could benefit researchers engaging in this field to sharpen their own future research directions, and provide practitioners with a greater understanding of the various types of accessibility metrics and help them to identify the most appropriate practice for their specific situation.

Introduction

Accessibility, firstly introduced by Hansen (1959), can be broadly defined as the ease with which activities at one place may be reached from another via a particular travel mode or any available modes (such as walk, bus, rail, bike, car, etc.) (Geurs and van Wee, 2004). According to the definition, accessibility combines not only the state of transportation networks, but also land uses and individuals with differing characteristics. Therefore, the concept of accessibility has long been central to many academic fields, such as transport engineering, regional geography, public health, spatial economics and so on (Páez et al., 2012; Geurs et al., 2015).

In the literature, various measures have been developed to quantify accessibility for different application contexts, and the majority of available reviews concerned with the comparison of conceptual and computational issues of those accessibility indicators, such as well-cited reviews by Handy and Niemeier (1997), Kwan (1998), Geurs and Wee, 2004a, Geurs and Wee, 2004b. Handy and Niemeier (1997) bridged the gap between the theoretical definition and practical applications of location-based accessibility measures and provided a conceptual framework to facilitate this gap that covered specification, calibration and interpretation. The review by Kwan (1998) concentrated on the comparison of location-based and individual-based accessibility measures by their data requirements, calculation process, and the degree of correlation between measures in practice. Compared with Handy and Niemeier (1997) and Kwan (1998), Geurs and Wee, 2004a, Geurs and Wee, 2004b adopted a broader base for their review. They compared and analyzed the theoretical basis, interpretability and communicability, data requirements and usability in social, and economic evaluations of various categories of accessibility measures, including infrastructure-based, location-based, individual-based, and utility-based measures.

In addition to updating these reviews cited above, more current reviews take an alternative perspective and focus on tracing the utilities or implications of accessibility measures in specific research field, such as park/green space accessibility (Park, 2017; Ekkel and De Vries, 2017), health-care facility accessibility (Guagliardo, 2004), accessibility and social equity (Tijs, 2015), accessibility instruments for planning practice (Papa et al., 2016).

Although these available reviews have provided valuable references that help to clarify the current state of accessibility-related research field, they often focus on certain perspectives and none of them presents a comprehensive and quantitative overview on accessibility-related publications. A global review could offer robust and holistic background knowledge and figure out current progress and hot topics related with accessibility with a quick glance, thus could be an excellent resource for people new to accessibility research, and benefit researchers engaging in this field to sharpen their own future research directions. Moreover, it could provide practitioners with a greater understanding of the various types of accessibility metrics, improve their knowledge on how to generate such metrics, and help them to identify the most appropriate practice for their specific situation.

To fill this gap, this study reviewed approximately 20 years of publications (during 2000–2019) drawn from Web of Science (WoS), and aims to figure out the evolution pathway of accessibility related studies so that future research directions can be recognized. This research aim would be achieved by employing bibliometric analysis, which are set of methods to quantitatively analyze academic publications using statistical techniques, thus provide potential to trace the research trends and popular issues at global level. In detail, the specific contributions of this study include: (1) for characterizing the historical evolution of accessibility-related research, the bibliometric analysis techniques are firstly proposed in corresponding review studies; (2) a global, comprehensive and quantitative map of knowledge development and trajectory of efforts to understanding the accessibility research field are clarified; (3) useful guidance about where and how future research on accessibility is offered based on the well-understanding of current state of accessibility research field.

The remainder of the paper is organized as fellows. The next section presents a brief introduction on methods employing in this study, as well as data collection criteria. Then it is followed by section 3, which displays the key findings of current knowledge development of accessibility research field. Section 4 highlights academic hot topics and discusses pathways of future research. The paper concludes with a summary of results obtained so far and possible policy implications.

Section snippets

Methods

For achieving the research aim, bibliometric analysis techniques were employed in this study. The bibliometric analysis is an effective method to quantitatively analyze academic publications using statistical techniques, consists of citation analysis and content analysis (Zhong et al., 2016). The citation network analysis implies the linkages between citing and cited publications as well as researchers' interactions, thus helps to visualize the sub-fields and corresponding intellectual

Overview of the historical and geographical trends

Fig. 1 represents the historical trends of annual published papers number and total citations frequency between 2000 and 2019. According to Fig. 1, the number of annual publications kept increasing during the past two decades: in the early 2000s, the publication number kept relatively stable; it started to increase from the late 2000s, followed by a sharper growth in the 2010s. As a result, there is a total of 1600% growth during the past two decades, outrunning the average number of 520% in

Implications and future research directions

As mentioned in the methods section, bibliometric analysis could serve broader objectives, provide a potential to trace the research trends and popular issues, and identify possible spaces of future progress and engagement. This final section therefore aims to highlight some priorities for further research, categorized by two sub-sections: new accessibility indicators development and accessibility-based applications. This is because current accessibility studies mainly can be divided into those

Conclusions

Accessibility is a key concept in the field of transportation, as well as geography, public health, spatial economics and so on. There is a rich amount of reviews available on this topic which concentrate on certain perspectives and none of them presents a comprehensive and quantitative overview on accessibility-related publications. To fill this gap, this study reviewed two decades of publications (during 2000–2019) drawn from WoS, and aims to figure out the evolution pathway of accessibility

Acknowledgements

This research was funded by High-level Innovation and Entrepreneurship Talents Program of Jiangsu Province of China [grant number 1711120014], the Senior Talent Foundation of Jiangsu University [grant number 5501120011]; the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 71801115 and 71871107]; and the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu [grant number BK20190845]. We are grateful to Michiel van Meeteren for giving us useful advice in conducting the bibliometric analysis.

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