Análisis bibliométrico de las tendencias de investigación económica y geografía regional

Laburpena

Knowing the state of a subject or a discipline is a previous crucial task to conduct any work, therefore it is important for researchers to have tools that allow them to know beforehand the state of the art of the subject. This paper presents a methodology to conduct a bibliometric analysis as a new source of information to identify scientific production in a given field, as well as research trends in different topics. To present the usefulness of bibliometric studies, two general fields have been selected: economic geography and regional geography, with the aim of analysing the intellectual progress of these disciplines. The tool used helps not only to examine the evolution of production in these branches of the geography field, but also to identify those topics of interest or future research fronts. Specifically, the works analyses the publications of the Web of Science (WoS) database through a search query of its 'core' of publications. In this sense, the following indicators of scientific production are analyzed: volume of scientific production, main agents involved (organizations and countries) and thematic analysis (WoS categories and keyword maps). The results obtained show that there has been an increasing growth of scientific production in these areas of geography, although with different patterns (for example, thematic specialization) between both.