Comprehensive exploration of urban health by bibliometric analysis: 35 years and 11,299 articles

This paper aims to evaluate the health issues related to urbanization and get an overview of urban health with the bibliometric approach, the powerful tool in quantitatively macroscopic analysis across multiple disciplines. A total of 11,299 articles and 5,579 Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) terms from the year 1978-2012 were retrieved by searching PubMed/MEDLINE using MeSH term "urban health". The bibliographic information was analyzed to summarize the overall research characteristics. MeSH terms were sorted by their normalized frequency. Top 10 % of the high-frequency MeSH terms were classified into categories (physical environment, health effects, social environment and counter-measures) and analyzed. We investigated the themes and their tendency of the corresponding categories by co-occurrence word (co-word) and regression analysis. We concluded and elaborated nine themes of physical environment, ten themes of health effects, three themes of social environment and four themes of counter-measures in urban health, as well as the main themes in five representative countries (USA, India, China, South Africa and Japan). We present a data-based overview of the issues in urban health, as reference for further researchers.Computer Science, Interdisciplinary ApplicationsInformation Science & Library ScienceSCI(E)SSCI0ARTICLEimilibrary@outlook.com3881-8949