Research characteristics and status on Environmental Psychology: a bibliometric and knowledge mapping analysis

Environmental psychology is an interdisciplinary field that focuses on the interplay between individuals and their built and natural environments. Great progress has been made in the areas of environmental psychology by researchers form many countries. However, a thorough quantitative analysis to the emergent research trends and topics has not been found. To reveal the research characteristics and status on Environmental Psychology, 853 related papers from Web of Science core collection were analysed by CiteSpace II. The results show that: (1) the domain of Environmental Psychology was started in 1960s and showed a low growth over the past half century, which reaches a historical peak in 2017. Gifford, USA and the Journal of Environmental Psychology top the list of contributing authors, country and publication respectively. (2) "Environmental Psychology" is the most frequently keywords and has the longest span of the bursts. "ambient scent", "recycling", "children as outsiders" and "ambient temperature" are the top four largest clusters, which are the popular research topics in the domain of environmental psychology.