Development of socially sustainable transport research: A bibliometric and visualization analysis

The transport sector plays an important role as a dynamic network linking social, economic, and environmental dimensions. In recent decades, socially sustainable development has become essential to multinational trans-portation policies and strategies. Several bibliometric analysis studies have systematically evaluated sustainable transport, economically sustainable transport, and environmentally sustainable transport; however, no such analysis has been conducted on socially sustainable transport. In response to this research gap, we conducted a comprehensive bibliometric analysis and thorough visualization and mapping of socially sustainable transport research over 1993-2021. A total of 2,703 publications from the Web of Science core collection database were analyzed using VOSviewer, ArcGIS, and CiteSpace. The results found that the United States of America published 17.13% of the total number of articles, China published 14.17% of the articles, and the United Kingdom pub-lished 13.47% of the articles. Four stages of development were identified: 50 articles in the initial stage (1993-2000), 76 articles in the exploration stage (2001-2005), 550 articles in the stable development stage (2006-2014), and 1877 articles in the rapid development stage (2015-2021). Cluster analysis revealed two persistent research topics: multi-objective optimization and social sustainability index for the transport sector. Emerging research topics included shared transport, frames of transportation, smart city, sustainable mobility, and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on mobility. Finally, we explored the four potential avenues to develop the socially sustainable transport field. These analytical findings may be valuable for sustainable transportation industry practitioners, researchers, and policymakers.