A bibliometric analysis of research trends in Sustainable Cities and Society (SCS)

Launched in 2011, Sustainable Cities and Society (SCS) is a prominent international journal that focuses on environmentally sustainable and socially resilient cities. This bibliometric analysis of SCS aims to outline its priorities, orientations, and future prospects and identify its critical contributions to studies on sustainability and resilience of cities. Bibliographic data associated with a corpus of 6,257 documents published in SCS from 2011 through 2025 (in the first half) were initially exported from the Web of Science. Using the specific software, VOSviewer, performance analysis and science mapping were conducted. It presents a comprehensive overview of SCS, highlighting the most influential countries/regions, institutions, authors, and publications, along with background knowledge and relevant access channels. The analysis further identifies key research themes in SCS, which span foundational urban components and their optimization processes, urban development aligned with sustainability, resilience, and smart city concepts, as well as urban climate issues related to global warming, air quality, and public health—each featured with different evolution patterns. Finally, the study points to future research directions, including AI technology, human-centered approaches, and the integration of local and holistic perspectives. In all, this study can assist researchers in swiftly identifying general patterns and capturing the information of interest, while also offers insights into Sustainable Cities and Society: Advances, a newly established partner journal of SCS. • Unveiling the highlights of papers in SCS from multiple dimensions. • Exploring structured background knowledge involved in SCS & related accessing channels. • Discovering hot topics & evolving trends of SCS. • Summarizing the priorities, orientations, and future prospects of SCS via integration of data from different analyses.