GLOBAL RESEARCH OUTPUT IN GEOLOGICAL ENGINEERING: A BIBLIOMETRIC ANALYSIS OF WEB OF SCIENCE PUBLICATIONS

In recent years, the development of global geological engineering has made a series of progress. Bibliometric methods could quantitatively characterize the development of global scientific production and research trends in geological engineering. Publications of the last decade(2008~2017) about geological engineering were retrieved from the Web of Science(WoS) Core Collection database on May 07, 2018.27025 records were analysed, using VOS viewer as a tool. The results shows:(1) The number of publications increased noticeably in the past decade. China is the most active country in geological engineering research and has more collaborations in performing the studies with each other. (2) The high frequency terms in titles and abstracts show the research scope of geological engineering remain steady, but the research fields are broaden. (3) Five Chinese research institutions are in the top 10 productive institutions and have the most collaborations with the rest institutions of the world. Seven Chinese authors are among the top 13 productive authors. Ng C W W from China and Rowe R K from Canada are the most active researchers in the field of geological engineering, but h-index of Chinese institutions and authors are relatively lower. (4) Among the top 10 preferred journals, Engineering Geology published the most articles, with 1860, and Rock Mechanics and Rock Engineering has the highest impact factor, with 2.905. This is the first bibliometric approach to examine research related to geological engineering. It can provide reference for editors to the development of geological engineering.