Who is Leading the Housing Satisfaction Study: A Bibliometric Analysis based on Bibliometrix Tools and CiteSpace

Abstract

Due to its significant implications for individual well-being, community cohesion, and socio-economic development, housing satisfaction has increasingly become a critical topic in urban studies, sociology, and public policy. In 2023 alone, 149 articles related to housing satisfaction were indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection (with a cumulative total of 1,383 articles as of August 15, 2024). While these contributions enrich the research field, they also present challenges of information overload and difficulty in filtering relevant studies for application. Consequently, this study employs bibliometric methods to analyze the performance of existing research, focusing on key actors and influential works from five perspectives: country/region, institutions, authorship, publication sources, and citation metrics. Additionally, it categorizes the main branches of housing satisfaction research based on terminological standards to assist stakeholders in quickly identifying potential opportunities for support, collaboration, and citation. The results indicate that the United States and China dominate the field nationally, with institutions such as the Ohio University System and Hong Kong Baptist University forming the core research collaboration networks. At the author level, Hur Misun, Mouratidis Kostas, and Lu Max emerge as the most influential authors in terms of cumulative impact, short-term influence, and citation frequency, respectively. In terms of research branches, the most concentrated topics include residential satisfaction, housing satisfaction, and neighborhood satisfaction. The study also reveals that the research collaboration network in this field is relatively fragmented, with a reliance on traditional data sources and methods, and an overly concentrated distribution of research topics