Bibliometric analysis on global remote sensing research during 2010–2014

Bibliometric analysis based on the Science Citation Index Expanded published by the Thomson Scientific was carried out to identify the research trend of remote sensing between 2010 and 2014. Our analysis reveals the institutional, national, spatiotemporal, and categorical patterns in remote sensing research both from WP (whole publications) view and HCP (high-cited publications) view. Remote sensing research almost doubled during 2010-2014. Environmental Sciences was the most attractive subject category among remote sensing research. International Journal of Remote Sensing was the most productive journal, but IEEE Transactions on geoscience and Remote Sensing published the most HCP among the 31 distributed journals. The productive ranking of countries was headed by US both in WP view and HCP view, CAS was the most productive institutes both in WP view and HCP view with lower CPP. “Classification”, “Change detection” and “hyperspectral” were emerging as the most prevalent research topic during 2010-2014. The statistics illustrated that remote sensing researchers had turned study interests from “microwave remote sensing” to “hyperspectral remote sensing” during 2010-2014.