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Article

A Bibliometric Analysis of Research on Human Settlements Improvement Based on CNKI and Web of Science

by
Chenxi Li
1,2,
Jinfeng Miao
3,*,
Xuan Zhai
1 and
Qiao Liu
1
1
School of Public Administration, Xi’an University of Architecture and Technology, Xi’an 710055, China
2
Technology Innovation Center for Land Engineering and Human Settlements, Shaanxi Land Engineering Construction Group Co., Ltd., Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an 712000, China
3
Department of Economic Management, Hebei Vocational University of Technology and Engineering, Xingtai 054000, China
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Buildings 2025, 15(11), 1805; https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings15111805
Submission received: 15 April 2025 / Revised: 16 May 2025 / Accepted: 23 May 2025 / Published: 24 May 2025
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Urban Infrastructure and Resilient, Sustainable Buildings)
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Abstract

:
In the context of rural revitalization, scientific and efficient improvement of the human settlement environment is of great practical significance to improve the quality of life of farmers as well as to promote modern rural construction. To understand the research status and trends of human settlement environment improvement, the paper visually analyzed the relevant literature from 2012 to 2022 based on CNKI and the Web of Science database with the help of CiteSpace software(developed by Chaomei Chen, Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA, USA) (v6.2.r2). The results show the following: (1) the research literature on human settlement environment improvement has undergone three stages of slow growth, steady growth, and explosive growth; (2) many countries and institutions have published research on the improvement of human settlement environment, forming a close cooperative relationship; (3) three research hotspots have been formed: the concept and classification of the human settlement environment, the improvement path of the human settlement environment, and the evaluation method of the human settlement environment; and (4) waste management and green space are the frontier issues in the field of human settlement environment improvement. The subsequent research on the improvement of human settlement environments should strengthen the breadth and depth of research, improve the evaluation index system, innovate research methods, and build interdisciplinary integration, to provide a perfect research paradigm for research on the improvement of human settlement environments in the future.

1. Introduction

The human settlement environment is a complex system with human beings as the core and villages, towns, cities, and other settlements, which encompass the most basic infrastructure needed for human survival, as well as the natural and social environment on which human life and production depend [1]. With the rapid development of the global economy, traffic congestion, environmental degradation, and housing shortages have emerged one after another, seriously affecting people’s human settlement environment [2]. The increase in problems of the human settlement environment has become a major threat to socio-economic development and human health. Therefore, there is an urgent to carry out scientific and efficient work for improving the human settlement environment.
The study of the human settlement environment can be traced back to the 1950s, when Doxiadis first proposed the science of human settlement [3]. The “Vancouver Declaration on Human Settlements”, issued at the Vancouver Conference on Human Settlements in 1976, and the “Adequate Shelter for All” and “Sustainable Human Settlements Development in an Urbanizing World” presented at the Second United Nations Conference on Human Settlements, held in Istanbul in 1996, have led to two major themes. “Sustainable human settlements development in an urbanizing world” made sustainable human settlement environment development a universal global agenda [4]. In 2002, the United Nations established the Living Agenda to promote the development of human settlements [5]. At the Third Plenary Session of the 16th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in 2003, the state emphasized rural development as a key issue in China’s economic and social development and requested local governments and society to actively participate in rural construction planning practices. Since then, a series of rural planning practices have been developed, such as the “Modernization of New Rural Construction” in Jiangsu Province and the “Ten Thousand Villages Improvement and Thousand Villages Demonstration” in Zhejiang Province [6].
In 2008, the Urban and Rural Planning Law established the legal status of rural planning, the preparation system, and the relationship with urban and rural planning, and in 2010, the National No. 1 Document proposed to “improve the human settlement environment by improving the treatment of garbage and sewage”. In 2012, the No. 1 Document of the Central Government again proposed to promote rural environmental improvement and improve the human settlement environment in rural areas. In 2014, the General Office of the State Council issued the “Guidance Opinions on Improving Rural Environment”, proposing “to improve the rural environment as the focus, and comprehensively improve the human settlement environment”. In 2018, in the context of China’s rural development, the “Three-Year Action Plan for the Improvement of Human Settlement Environment” was issued, in which the requirement of “strengthening rural waste and gradually promoting urban sewage treatment” was put forward. In 2021, the General Office of the CPC Central Committee and the General Office of the State Council issued the “Five-Year Action Plan to Improve the Human Settlement Environment (2021–2025)”, which further proposed to “promote the improvement of rural toilets, garbage treatment, sewage treatment, comprehensive river treatment, and improve the human settlement environment according to local conditions” as a key task. In 2022, the report of the 20th National Congress proposed to fundamentally combat soil pollution, improve infrastructure, and improve the rural human settlement environment. The report of the 20th National Congress in 2022 proposed to radically combat soil pollution, improve infrastructure, and improve the human settlement environment. However, a current specific human settlement environment improvement program is still not available. At the same time, the academic community has launched intense discussions and formed different opinions on the construction tasks, governance methods, and comprehensive evaluation of the human settlement environment [7].
Scholars are involved in a wide range of research fields on human settlement environment improvement, but there is a lack of research results based on scientometric analysis. Therefore, this paper uses the CiteSpace knowledge mapping visualization software (v6.2.r2) to systematically sort out the relevant literature of research on human settlement environment improvement, analyze research progress, and predict future research directions, aiming to help researchers gain a deeper understanding of the current situation and trends of human settlement environment improvement, summarize research hotspots and major research contents, and form a panoramic knowledge network structure. A comprehensive evaluation of the current research progress on human settlement environment improvement shows that the current academic-related research lacks research breadth and depth, research methods, evaluation index system, and multidisciplinary integration. The objectives of this study are as follows: (1) to understand the current status of research on the human settlement environment in terms of annual publication trends and cooperation between publishing countries and institutions; (2) to reveal research hotspots on the human settlement environment based on keyword co-occurrence; (3) to identify research frontiers on the human settlement environment based on the top 20 emergent keywords; and (4) to put forward the future outlook of human settlement environment improvement research at home and abroad.
This study includes five parts: introduction, data sources and research methodology, results and analysis, discussion, and conclusions. Firstly, this paper introduces the research background and raises the research questions. Secondly, this paper understands the research status through the changing trend of annual articles and the distribution of countries and institutions. On this basis, the hotspots and trends are summarized through high-frequency keywords and the sudden occurrence of keywords. Then, based on the above analysis, the paper proposes the shortcomings of the current research and further proposes future research directions. Finally, this paper presents a summary and conclusions.

2. Data Sources and Research Methods

2.1. Data Sources

In this paper, CiteSpace Knowledge Graph visualization software (v6.2.r2) was used to select the China Knowledge Network (CNKI) database and the Web of Science (WOS) database as data sources, and the relevant literature was searched. By using the advanced search function of CNKI and the basic search criteria of WOS, the paper selected academic journals with “topic” = “human settlement environment improvement”, set the search period from 1 January 2012 to 31 December 2022, set the type of literature as journal papers, and retrieved 1878 Chinese papers and 2037 English papers in total. Then, the authors manually culled the non-academic literature and finally obtained 1828 Chinese and 1975 English papers on the improvement of the human settlement environment.

2.2. Research Methodology

CiteSpace software (v6.2.r2) mainly represents the relationship between nodes through connecting lines, tree diagrams, etc., and draws an information map to dynamically identify the current status of research, research hotspots, and future research directions [8,9]. Figure 1 shows the research process of this paper. The paper selects CNKI as the database of the Chinese literature and WOS as the database of the English literature. The topic is “human settlement environment improvement”. Through searching, there are 1828 Chinese and 1975 English papers that meet the requirements. The research status includes “Trends in the annual production of literature” and “Distribution of research countries and institutions”. Topics of high research interest include “Concept and Classification of human settlement environment”, “Study on the path of human settlement environment improvement”, and “Study on the evaluation method of human settlement environment”. Research frontiers include “Waste management” and “Green space”. Finally, the paper concludes that future research proposals are to ”strengthen the breadth and depth of Research”, “improve the evaluation index system”, and “build multidisciplinary cross-fertilization”.

3. Results and Analysis

3.1. Research Status

3.1.1. Trends in the Annual Production of Literature

To understand more accurately the publication trend of the research literature on human settlement environment improvement, this paper draws a graph of the annual publication trend of research on human settlement environment improvement in the past ten years (Figure 2). Figure 2 shows that the amount of Chinese and international research on human settlement environment improvement has shown a trend of “slow growth—steady growth—explosive growth” in the past ten years. The average annual number of articles published in the Chinese literature was 15.5 during the slow growth phase (2012–2013), about 40 during the steady growth phase (2014–2017), and about 40 during the explosive growth phase (2018–2022). The number of articles published in 2020 and 2021 was 431 and 430, respectively, which is about 28 times that of the slow increase phase. A look at the international sample literature shows the following: in the slow growth phase (2012–2017), the number of articles on human settlement environment improvement rose to 3–11 per year; in the steady growth phase (2018–2019), the number of articles issued increased significantly compared with the previous period, reaching a maximum of 202. In the explosive growth phase (2020–2022), the number of articles increases rapidly, reaching 378 articles by 2022, with an average annual volume of about 319 articles. In summary, the literature related to improvement of the human settlement environment is increasing year by year, which indicates that it still has a high research intensity.

3.1.2. Distribution of Research Countries and Institutions

A study of the countries and institutions that have published research on human settlement environment improvement can provide an accurate understanding of the importance that scholars attach to this research topic. From the literature included in the WOS source journals, a total of 119 countries and 392 research institutions are included in the English research literature on human settlement environment improvement, and a co-occurrence map of foreign countries and research institutions is drawn in this paper (Figure 3 and Figure 4). The size of the circles of nodes represents the number of publications, and it can be seen from Figure 3 that China and the United States are the top two countries in terms of the number of publications. As can be seen from Figure 4, the United States has the highest number of institutional publications, including the University of California (41), Harvard University (18), and Johns Hopkins University (18), in addition to the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (39), and the rest are evenly distributed among the United Kingdom, France, and Australia. This shows that research on human settlement environment improvement has attracted widespread attention in various countries in the last decade.
Table 1 shows the distribution of publishing institutions in China, with 288 research institutions involved in research on human settlement environment improvement, among which the Institute of Rural Development of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences is in first place with 15 publications. It can be seen that various countries and research institutions attach importance to research on human settlement environment improvement. Nany Yuliastutil et al. proposed how local governments and communities should make decisions when building ecological villages with a good living environment [10]. Liaghat, M. explored and selected some evaluation indexes of coastal tourist destinations in the Dixon port area of Malaysia by using AHP alone [11]. Several factors influencing the environmental development of rural settlements were studied by E. Shcherbin et al. and a map of the potential of clustering in the Mogilev region of Russia was developed [12]. A significant number of scholars have also conducted research on the topic [13,14,15,16,17,18].

3.2. Research Hotspots

Keywords are the core and essence of research, involving a high concentration and refinement of the research topic and research area. From the bibliometric point of view, the number of high-frequency co-cited keywords is directly proportional to the cluster size, and they can directly reflect the hotspots in the research field of a certain discipline [19]. Therefore, the frequency of keywords and related links provide a clearer understanding of the research hotspots in the field of human settlement environment improvement. In the CiteSpace keyword mapping, the larger the node represents the higher frequency of the keyword (Figure 5). The research literature on “human settlement environment, rural revitalization, environmental remediation, remediation work, and rural areas” appears more than 100 times in Chinese human settlement environment improvement (Table 2). International research on human settlement environment improvement mainly focuses on “health, physical, activity” and other keywords, which have become a research hotspot in the past decade (Table 2). According to the relevant literature on human settlement environment improvement in recent years, the research hotspots in the field of human settlement environment improvement can be summarized into the following three aspects.

3.2.1. Concept and Classification of Human Settlement Environment

The concept of human settlement environment was initially put forth by China’s human settlement environment science leader Wu Liang Yong [1], in the Doxiadis “human settlement” and other research based on the proposed human settlement environment, which states that the human settlement living space and survival base are an important place for people to use and transform nature, and are closely related to human production and development. He believed that the human settlement environment is a large system with rich content, including five subsystems—natural system, human system, housing system, social system, and support system—dividing living into five levels, namely, building, community (village), city, region, and global, concerning the type and scale of human settlement [1]. From the perspective of urban planning, Ren explains the human settlement environment as a sustainable environment that satisfies human living conditions while ensuring harmony between housing and nature [20]. From the perspective of architecture, Chen believes that the human settlement environment is the space where people gather and live, and it is not only the basis for human survival in nature, but also an important place for human transformation and use of nature [21]. When creating a building for humans to live in, the different requirements of living, working, and public services are taken into consideration. Many scholars define the human settlement environment from the perspective of different disciplines such as geography, ecology, and sociology [22,23,24].
The classification of human settlement environment has been greatly debated in academia. Li et al. defined the human settlement environment from two perspectives: narrow and broad [25]. The narrow sense of human settlement environment defines it as a space for human activities and focuses on the space or entity; the broad sense of human settlement environment is the sum of various material and immaterial elements surrounding the human subject. He believed that the object of scientific research on the human settlement environment is the broad sense of living. Tan et al. divided it into urban human settlement environment and rural human settlement environment in terms of geographical space [26]; Zhang divided it into macro, meso, and micro living from the perspective of spatial scale [27], while Ning and Zha pointed out that the hard environment is the carrier of the soft environment, and the livability of the soft environment is the value orientation of the hard environment [28].
In general, the human settlement environment is a complex and huge system in which the natural and artificial environments are interwoven and integrated [29].

3.2.2. Study on the Path of Human Settlement Environment Improvement

International human settlement environment improvement started earlier, and has gone through the stage of large-scale reconstruction and emphasis on quantity after the war to the stage of both quantity and quality, and then to the stage of emphasis on quality, especially environmental quality after the 1970s, and has made a series of progressive moves [30]. The UK focuses on the sustainable development of satellite cities, villages, and towns, involving various aspects such as resource consumption, environmental protection, social equity, public participation and decision-making, economic activities, and comprehensive evaluation, which are used to guide the practice of human settlement environment [31]. Germany has improved the human settlement environment through land consolidation, village renewal, nature conservation, urban–rural integration, and community creation [32]. In the Netherlands, rural areas are built from the persistence of traditional rural landscapes, the preservation of regional structural green areas, and the construction of rural recreational areas [33]. Japan is taking the opportunity of “one village, one product” to explore regional characteristics and advantages, promoting rural development through product economy and enhancing the internal vitality of rural areas [34]. Korea’s “New Village Movement” aims to improve the quality of housing for rural households, and promotes rural development by using various organizations such as civil society organizations and agricultural technology, with government support and social follow-up as the development method [35]. In addition, Singapore, India, and other countries have also started to improve the quality of housing. In addition, Singapore and India have also started to improve their urban living, with Singapore focusing on housing, public services, and road construction [36].
Improvement of the human settlement environment in China has been further researched mainly based on foreign governance experience, and many scholars have mainly discussed it in macro and micro scales. From the macroscopic scale, the research on human settlement environment improvement mainly focuses on urban clusters and provincial levels. Taking six western provinces as examples, Su et al., based on collective action theory and planned behavior theory, proposed that various forms of rural human settlement environment publicity and education activities should be carried out to raise farmers’ awareness of environmental protection [37]. Taking Henan Province as an example, Lu et al., by combing through the relevant literature, argued that environmental pollution in Henan Province is mainly caused by inappropriate emissions of rural household waste, rural farming manure, and agricultural production chemicals, and proposed governance initiatives such as further increasing financial investment in pollution control, strengthening infrastructure construction, enhancing farmers’ environmental awareness, and strengthening the legal management of rural environmental protection [38].
From the microscopic scale, ethnic minority areas and villages become the key areas for human settlement environment improvement. Sun took the Tibetan ethnic region as the research object, conducting a household survey on 721 households, and using the generalized maximum entropy Logit analysis method, analyzed the willingness of rural households in ethnic minority regions to participate in rural human settlement environment improvement from the perspectives of household endowment and outworking; he proposed enhancing the willingness of Tibetan households to participate in the human settlement environment improvement in four aspects: environmental publicity, policy subsidies, technical training, and village rules and regulations [39]. Wang et al. used 296 villages in Chongqing as an example to investigate the situation of agricultural waste, infrastructure, farm buildings, and sanitary toilets and proposed that the organic combination of top–down decision-making by the government and bottom–up participation by social organizations and farmers should be promoted and that feasible paths should be taken to strengthen the sanitary facilities, promote the change of customs, and enhance environmental awareness at the farmer level [40].

3.2.3. Study on the Evaluation Method of Human Settlement Environment

Human settlement environment evaluation is an important way to understand the condition of human settlement environment and assess the effectiveness of management. The World Health Organization (WHO) was the first to propose the basic concept of healthy human settlement environment, including the four elements of safety, health, convenience, and comfort of living, and to conduct evaluation studies of the human settlement environment on this basis [5]. In 1964, the U.S. Commission on Housing and Health proposed the “Basic Principles of Healthy Human Settlement Environment”, including six principles: conditions for disaster prevention and control, environmental conditions for human physiology, physiological requirements for living, conditions for disease prevention and infection prevention, spiritual satisfaction, and economic satisfaction. Since then, UN Living has focused on the areas of housing and social services, urban management, environment and infrastructure, and monitoring and information since 1989 [30]. Asami evaluated the human settlement environment in detail in terms of indicators of safety, health, convenience, comfort, and sustainability evaluation [41].
The evaluation of the human settlement environment in China is based on existing methods in foreign countries, mostly quantitative methods for in-depth research, which can be roughly divided into livability evaluation, sustainability evaluation, subjective and objective evaluation, satisfaction evaluation, and construction quality evaluation. Livability evaluation is mainly based on the human-oriented perspective of building a livable environment that is suitable for construction, production, and life. Zhu et al. constructed an index system from seven aspects of the urban landscape, environment, facilities, safety, transportation, economy, and management, and used PCA, GRA, and D-RSR to evaluate the livability of Xinyang City comprehensively. Sustainable development evaluation refers to the study of the human settlement environment from three aspects: production, living, and ecology [42]. Zhang et al. [43] established an index system for evaluating the sustainable development level of the rural human settlement environment from the perspective of natural and social resources, and used the development level (sustainable development potential) and coordination index (sustainable development trend) to construct a measurement model to explore the spatial variability and autocorrelation of human settlement environment. The comprehensive subjective and objective evaluation needs to consider the subjective and objective factors and combine the subjective feelings and objective situation to make a comprehensive evaluation of the rural human settlement environment. Xiao [44] put forward the four target layers of living facility environment, living ecological environment, living social environment, and living economic environment, and on this basis, five system layers of the rural human settlement environment evaluation index system are established. Satisfaction evaluation is to analyze the satisfaction degree of residents in the process of rural human settlement environment construction, and to evaluate the rural human settlement environment from the perspective of the main body of villagers. Ye et al. [45] used factor analysis to establish six index systems of living conditions, ecological environment, infrastructure, civilized countryside, effective governance, and affluent living, and made a comprehensive evaluation of villagers’ satisfaction with the rural human settlement environment in the Chao Hu Lake area. Construction quality evaluation is a quantitative and qualitative description of the overall strengths and weaknesses of rural construction elements. Liu et al. constructed the index system from five dimensions of production, life, appearance, customs, and governance, using hierarchical analysis and entropy value method to calculate the weights, and used a fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method to establish the evaluation model [46].

3.3. Research Frontiers

Keyword co-occurrence refers to the terms that appear more frequently in certain years, and by analyzing the years in which the emergent keywords appear, it can reflect the development trend and frontier of a certain research field over a while. Using the CiteSpace emergent keyword’s function, the top 20 emergent keywords in the field of human settlement environment improvement research in the past ten years were plotted (Table 3 and Table 4). In the keyword emergent map, “Strength” represents the emergent strength of the keywords, and “Begin” and “End” represent the beginning and end of the emergent words’ year.
Among the top 20 emergent keywords of Chinese human settlement environment improvement research in CNKI, the emergent intensity of “solid promotion” is the largest, followed by “livable countryside”, and “comprehensive”; the next keywords were “livable countryside”, “comprehensive treatment”, and “Ministry of Construction”. In the keywords map of foreign human settlement environment improvement research from WOS, “city, associations” has the highest emergent intensity, followed by “strategy” and “obesity”, “From 2020 to the present, “waste management, harmlessness, city, air pollution, quality, greenspace”, which have become the frontier issues in the field of human settlement environment improvement in recent years.

3.3.1. Waste Management

Chinese waste management is an important part of improving the human settlement environment, and is of great significance in promoting green development in rural areas and realizing good ecological governance in villages [47]. According to the survey results of China’s Ministry of Housing and Construction, 41 counties (cities and districts) nationwide have become “2020 demonstration counties for rural waste classification and resource utilization”, and more than 90% of villages have achieved effective waste collection and disposal, but only 50% of administrative villages have carried out waste classification [48]. This shows that farmers’ awareness of environmental protection is still relatively weak, the traditional thinking of rural residents is difficult to change, and there is still the phenomenon of throwing away garbage at will [49,50]. Therefore, in the future, the corresponding management units should enhance the awareness of environmental protection among villagers, carry out garbage classification publicity well, and improve the institutional mechanism of garbage classification, to improve the human settlement environment of rural residents [51,52,53].

3.3.2. Green Space

Promoting the green development of agriculture and rural areas is an inevitable requirement for implementing the new development concept and a major initiative to accelerate the modernization of agriculture and rural areas and promote sustainable development [54]. Since the implementation of the rural revitalization strategy, the special actions carried out around the country such as village appearance improvement and sewage treatment have achieved remarkable results in improving the human settlement environment and comprehensive management of outstanding environmental problems in rural areas, and have effectively promoted the development of the rural economy [55]. However, the process of rural environmental management is complex and complicated. However, the process of rural environmental management is complex and long-lasting, and the green transformation of agriculture and rural areas cannot be achieved overnight. It is necessary to actively promote green agricultural production methods, strengthen the protection and utilization of agricultural resources, continuously improve the rural human settlement environment, and promote green space for sustainable development [56,57].

4. Discussion

Through combing the hotspots and frontiers of research on human settlement environment improvement, there are still some problems and shortcomings in the current research on human settlement environment improvement, with insufficient research breadth and depth, incomplete research methods, unsound evaluation index system, and no cross-fertilization between disciplines. Based on the above analysis, the research potential of China’s human settlement environment improvement should be further explored from the following aspects in the future, as given below.

4.1. Strengthen the Breadth and Depth of Research

As mentioned above, although the research on human settlements improvement involves multiple provinces and regions, there is still the problem that appropriate governance paths cannot be formulated according to local actual conditions (keyword co-occurrence). In addition, scholars mainly focus on specific issues such as rural garbage treatment and sewage treatment, while there is little research on new rural construction and green space (the top 20 emergent keywords). The research on human settlement environment is mainly carried out in urban and rural areas, and scholars mostly focus on rural human settlement environments, with many studies on waste classification, sewage treatment, toilet revolution, village appearance, etc., but fewer studies on new rural construction and management, and green development of rural environment [58]. There is less research on new rural construction and management and green development of the rural environment. At present, although the research on the human settlement environment involves several provinces and regions, there are still problems such as the inability to develop appropriate governance paths according to local conditions. Therefore, the research on the human settlement environment does not only stop at the governance work, but should focus on the organic connection of county and township territorial spatial planning in the new era and then form a new rural spatial governance system [59,60].

4.2. Improve the Evaluation Index System

In the current research on human settlement environment evaluation, researchers mostly focus on quantitative indicators and ignore qualitative indicators [61]. The concept boundary of indicators is relatively vague, which leads to a large difference in the weighting of the same indicator in different literature, resulting in controversial evaluation results. This has led to controversial assessment results. In the future, an evaluation system and model combining objective reality and subjective cognition should be adopted to improve the technical methods of human settlement environment evaluation, strengthen the definition and specification of evaluation indicators from the level of national regulations, improve the accuracy of research results and comparability of research results, and optimize the evaluation indicator system [62,63].

4.3. Innovative Research Methods

Most of the current research is limited to a single discipline, lacking interdisciplinary cooperation (keyword co-occurrence chart). The lack of knowledge integration among ecology, economics, sociology, and other fields limits the comprehensiveness and applicability of research results. So far, most of the studies on human settlement environment improvement have adopted a combination of case and policy research, and proposed corresponding governance paths through pilot studies of specific provinces, urban clusters, minority areas, and counties. Digital governance is one of the future development directions of the human settlement environment, and future research can try to use more modern research tools, such as 3S technology, big data analysis, remote sensing images, and other emerging technologies [64,65,66].

4.4. Build Multidisciplinary Cross-Fertilization

Human settlement environment improvement requires integrated analysis from different disciplinary fields such as geography, architecture, sociology, economics, psychology, pathology, and pharmacology. For example, geography’s unique GIS geographic information science tools can provide strong technical support for architecture’s living renewal practice, and big data platforms and mathematical and statistical methods can be an expansion of quantitative research tools [67]. Combining the macroscopic perspective of economics and management with the microscopic perspective of sociology and architecture, and the disciplinary knowledge of ecology and urban and rural planning will promote a qualitative leap in human settlement environment improvement [68]. Therefore, future research on the human settlement environment is yet to be realized. Therefore, future human settlement environment research needs to build cross-fertilization among disciplines, and provide new paths for future human settlement environment research by drawing on research methods, ideas, and technical paths of related disciplines while strengthening the characteristics of our disciplines.

5. Conclusions and Research Prospect

5.1. Conclusions

Based on the CiteSpace visualization tool and bibliometric methods, the paper analyzed the research progress of human settlement environment improvement. First, the number of publications in this field has been increasing, and various countries and issuing institutions have attached importance to the research on human settlement environment improvement. Secondly, according to the keyword co-occurrence analysis, it can be seen that the current research mainly focuses on three aspects: the concept and classification of the human settlement environment, the path of human settlement environment improvement, and the study of human settlement environment evaluation methods. Finally, the analysis of the first 20 emergent keywords shows that waste management and green space have gradually become the research frontiers in the field of human settlement environment.
Based on the findings of this study, future improvement of the human living environment should be further strengthened and expanded on the existing base. First, it is necessary to extend the breadth and depth of research, especially in the exploration of personalized solutions in specific areas such as rural areas and ethnic minority settlements. Second, the evaluation index systems should be improved, combining emerging technologies such as big data and artificial intelligence, and enhancing the scientificity and accuracy of the assessment methodology to adapt to the ever-changing needs. Furthermore, cross-disciplinary integration and cross-cooperation among engineering, social sciences, and ecology should be promoted and encouraged to provide a comprehensive perspective for solving complex human living environment problems. In addition, policy support and practical guidance should be strengthened. Multiple fields provide a comprehensive perspective for solving complex human settlement environment problems; furthermore, they strengthen policy support and practical guidance to ensure that theoretical research results can be effectively transformed into practical policy measures, and to promote the active participation of local governments and all sectors of society in the improvement of the human settlement environment. Through these efforts, the human living environment will not only meet people’s basic needs, but also promote social equity and harmony as well as ecological protection. At the same time, continued attention to and integration of the latest scientific research results and technological advances around the world will help human society to better meet future challenges and create a better living environment.
This thesis also has certain limitations. This study mainly relies on the CNKI and WOF databases, which may have overlooked other important but unlisted resources, resulting in an incomplete understanding of the state of research on a global scale. As the period set is from 2012 to 2022, it fails to cover the latest research advances, especially those in rapidly developing emerging fields. Although CiteSpace software (v6.2.r2) provides powerful data analysis capabilities, it has limited ability to handle unstructured data, which may affect the validity of some deeper analyses. In summary, while this study provides valuable insights into understanding the current status and trends in the field of human settlement improvement, future work will need to overcome these limitations to more accurately capture the latest developments in the field and move it forward.

5.2. Research Prospect

In 2022, the Chinese government issued the “Five Year Action Plan for Improving Rural Human Settlements”. Therefore, since 2022, the focus of China’s human settlements research has been different from before, which is our main consideration in selecting the research period. In the future, bibliometric analysis of research on human settlements improvement will continue to conduct similar research starting from 2023. In terms of data acquisition, more source databases should be considered in the future to enhance the comprehensiveness of text retrieval.

Author Contributions

C.L.: Conceptualization and Writing—original draft; J.M.: Data curation; Project administration; Investigation; X.Z.: Methodology; Q.L.: Software; Writing—review and editing. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

Funding

This work was supported by General Project of Humanities and Social Sciences Research of the Ministry of Education (23YJC630076), Shaanxi Natural Science Basic Research Program (grant number 2023-JC-QN-0803), Open Fund Funding Projects of Technology Innovation Center for Land Engineering and Human Settlements, Shaanxi Land Engineering Construction Group Co., Ltd. and Xi’an Jiaotong University (grant number 2024WHZ2056) and S&T Program of Baoding (No. 2363P022).

Data Availability Statement

The original contributions presented in this study are included in the article. Further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author.

Acknowledgments

The authors sincerely thank the editor and anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions to improve the quality of this paper.

Conflicts of Interest

Author Chenxi Li was employed by Shaanxi Land Engineering Construction Group Co., Ltd. The remaining author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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Figure 1. Research framework.
Figure 1. Research framework.
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Figure 2. Change trend of human settlement environment improvement.
Figure 2. Change trend of human settlement environment improvement.
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Figure 3. Mapping of the co-occurrence of countries publishing papers on international human settlement environment improvement studies.
Figure 3. Mapping of the co-occurrence of countries publishing papers on international human settlement environment improvement studies.
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Figure 4. Mapping of international human settlement environment improvement research-publishing institutions’ co-occurrence maps.
Figure 4. Mapping of international human settlement environment improvement research-publishing institutions’ co-occurrence maps.
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Figure 5. Keyword map of research on foreign human settlement environment improvement.
Figure 5. Keyword map of research on foreign human settlement environment improvement.
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Table 1. Map of human settlement environment improvement research-issuing agencies in China.
Table 1. Map of human settlement environment improvement research-issuing agencies in China.
InstitutionNumber of Articles Issued
Institute of Rural Development, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences15
New Rural Office of Jilin Province13
Department of Rural Social Enterprise Promotion, Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs9
Xiaokang—China Xiaokang Network9
Xinhua News Agency9
Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs8
Housing and Urban-Rural Development Department of Jiangsu Province5
Yunnan Provincial General Station of Rural Energy Management5
College of Marxism, South China Agricultural University4
Contemporary Guizhou4
Table 2. Ranking of the top ten high-frequency keywords in human settlement improvement research.
Table 2. Ranking of the top ten high-frequency keywords in human settlement improvement research.
SourceSort KeywordsFrequency
Chinese1Living environment333
2Rural revitalization305
3Environmental remediation126
4Remediation work112
5Rural100
6Toilet revolution59
7Remediation57
8Comprehensive remediation41
9Beautiful Country41
10Village planning40
International1Health119
2Physical activity106
3Performance87
4Impact86
5Environment77
6Management65
7Model64
8People63
9Quality of life58
10Built environment54
Table 3. The top 20 emergent keywords of Chinese human settlement environment improvement research.
Table 3. The top 20 emergent keywords of Chinese human settlement environment improvement research.
KeywordsYearStrengthBeginEnd
New Rural20122.6920122013
Village Improvement20132.9420132014
Construction20141.820142016
Livable Countryside20154.6620152019
Ministry of Construction20153.920152018
Comprehensive remediation20164.2420162018
Specialized actions20171.8720172018
State Council20187.8320182019
Solid promotion20184.7820182019
Jilin Province20183.5420182019
Beautiful China20182.2420182019
Informal20182.2420182019
Yongji County20182.2420182019
Yu Xinrong20181.7920182019
Constructed Village20181.7920182019
Chongqing20181.7920182019
Rural Ecology20181.7520182019
Territorial Tourism20191.7520192020
Harmless20202.3220202022
Waste Management20201.920202022
Table 4. The top 20 emerging keywords in the study of international human settlement environment improvement.
Table 4. The top 20 emerging keywords in the study of international human settlement environment improvement.
KeywordsYearStrengthBeginEnd
Walking20124.3520122016
Care20122.8420122014
Associations20134.7420132016
Dementia20132.9520132015
Patterns20123.4820142015
Motion20142.9420142015
Activities of daily living20153.6620152017
Strategy20164.5120162018
Living cells20133.4320162018
Program20174.420172019
Obesity20154.3720172019
Prevention20133.9620172019
Survival20173.120172019
Model20143.5120182019
Mechanisms20153.3320192020
Pollution20192.9520192022
City20204.7420202022
Air pollution20144.2620202022
Quality20123.3120202022
Green space20202.9420202022
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Li, C.; Miao, J.; Zhai, X.; Liu, Q. A Bibliometric Analysis of Research on Human Settlements Improvement Based on CNKI and Web of Science. Buildings 2025, 15, 1805. https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings15111805

AMA Style

Li C, Miao J, Zhai X, Liu Q. A Bibliometric Analysis of Research on Human Settlements Improvement Based on CNKI and Web of Science. Buildings. 2025; 15(11):1805. https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings15111805

Chicago/Turabian Style

Li, Chenxi, Jinfeng Miao, Xuan Zhai, and Qiao Liu. 2025. "A Bibliometric Analysis of Research on Human Settlements Improvement Based on CNKI and Web of Science" Buildings 15, no. 11: 1805. https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings15111805

APA Style

Li, C., Miao, J., Zhai, X., & Liu, Q. (2025). A Bibliometric Analysis of Research on Human Settlements Improvement Based on CNKI and Web of Science. Buildings, 15(11), 1805. https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings15111805

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