Bibliometric analysis and global research trends of climate change and cities studies for 30 years (1990–2021)

Climate change has become a global problem, and its impacts have worsened in recent decades. City is the most vulnerable area to climate change impacts and has the potential to be the catalyst of climate change. This study applies bibliometric analysis to understand the current research status and developments in climate change and city studies from 1990 to 2021. Support vector machine (SVM) was used to analyze the future keywords prediction in the topic. Using the Web of Science database, this study examined 1276 articles. The results show that climate change and cities studies in the last three decades have gone through three phases: initial (1990–2006), transition (2007–2014), and rapid development (2015–2021). The topic about climate change and cities is developing rapidly, given the increasing intensity of climate change impacts in urban areas. Result shows the current research status, hot spots, and trends in the topic based on nodes: author, country, institution, category, grant, and keyword. This study also compares hot spots and trends based on keywords in two datasets. “City,” “vulnerability,” and “management” were in the top position keywords from reference dataset, while “city,” “climate change,” and “impact” were the top 3 from the 1990–2021 dataset. The SVM result shows “climate change,” “adaptation,” “city,” “vulnerability,” and “governance” will be future research hot spots for climate change and city studies. Overall, this study provides an overview of important issues in climate change and cities from 1990 to 2021 and offers future research directions on this topic.