Visualization analysis of high-speed railway research based on CiteSpace

With the rapid advancements of high-speed railway (HSR) in recent years, the results of HSR research are fruitful. This study aims to identify the research status quo and development trends of HSR using visualization analysis with CiteSpace. We retrieved published papers (1900-2019) from the Web of Science core collection with a topic search related to HSR. Next, we generated author, institution, and country co-authorship networks to identify the top productive authors, institutions, and countries, respectively, the journal co-citation network to determine the distribution of core journals, the document co-citation network to reveal the main research themes and explore the knowledge structure, the author co-citation network to identify the influential authors, and the keywords co-occurrence network to detect research hotspots and research frontiers. These analyses informed about the main contributing force of HSR research at three levels of authors, institutions, and countries, the knowledge sources and interdisciplinary characteristics of HSR, the major research domains and knowledge structures present status of HSR, and the orientations for further research. Furthermore, the case of China suggests that policy support is conducive to promote the development of HSR research.