Mapping the Landscape of Public Participation GIS Using Natural Language Processing

Since the 1990s, public participation geographic information systems (PPGIS) have advanced rapidly and have been widely used in social and environmental studies and planning practice. Scholars and practitioners have published hundreds of conceptual and empirical studies related to PPGIS. We review the literature’s main characteristics, including the temporal evolution of research fronts, geographical distribution, key authors, patterns of global cooperation, and dissemination outlets. Using a mixed-method approach that combines bibliometric analysis and latent Dirichlet allocation topic modeling, we present the findings from an analysis of metadata from 699 articles published between 1997 and 2023, sourced from Web of Science and Scopus, offering insights into the application and dissemination of PPGIS. We identify twenty main themes of PPGIS research, such as advancements in PPGIS software, perceptions of ecosystem services, travel behavior, and conservation priorities. Several topics, however, such as land planning and management, environmental quality, and climate change vulnerability, remain relatively underrepresented. Notably, Westernized nations—particularly the United States, Finland, Australia, and the United Kingdom—have dominated the PPGIS output, with a significant increase in research since 2009. These findings improve our understanding of the current state of PPGIS research and provide suggestions for future research.