Visualizing international author collaboration characteristics and topic burst on transportation management: A bibliometric analysis

Background: Whether the international author collaboration and keywords on the topic of transportation management has been changed in the last several decades remains unclear. Along with the big data and API(allocation programming interface) emerged as a field of research with increasing attention being paid to it by scientific researchers and a rapid increase in related literature being reported using the bibliometric analysis, the international author collaboration and keywords should be explored to analyze the current state of research, including publication outputs, in-depth collaboration characteristics and keyword topics of transportation management research.Methods: The authors collected two published papers in Medline library and downloaded their 206 similar articles without duplication since 1977. Various statistical techniques and bibliometric measures were employed, including publication growth analysis; journal distribution; and collaboration network analysis at the author country/area collaboration level. The visualization maps of international author collaboration and burst terms were drawn on Google maps using social network analysis(SNA) and cluster analysis. Gini coefficient(GC) was applied to measure inequality of density indices among clusters.Results: A total of 208 bibliographic records on transportation management were collected. The earliest paper was published in 1977, with the number of papers sharply rising at the inflection point of the year 2014. We found that (1) the most number of papers on the topic of transportation management are from the U.S.( 43,27.04%), Spain(21,13.21%), and China(18, 11.32%); (2) the most linked keywords are organization & administration, analysis, education, and statistics & numerical data, and trends; (3) keyword networks presents lower GC that author collaborations among their respective clusters.   Conclusions: The collaboration of international authors on transportation management is not tight and stable. The focus of research topics on transportation management is centralized(Gini=0.48) more than that of author collaboration(Gini=0.33). Our study might provide a potential guide for future research on the topic of transportation management.