روند جهانی پژوهش در حوزة توسعه پایدار روستایی: یک تحلیل علم‌سنجی

Introduction
Sustainable rural development is important in the world for several reasons, including preserving and strengthening natural and environmental potentials, creating employment and reducing social and economic inequalities, developing sustainable agriculture, increasing production and development of local industries, improving living standards and improving conditions, health, and climate, development of local culture and identity and improvement of the level of education and research in villages, as well as the impact of urban and rural links in national and regional development programs around the world. At the same time, the examination of the subject's background shows that many bibliographic studies focus on rural development, geographical signs and sustainable rural development, rural tourism, sustainable rural livelihood, rural revitalization, sustainable agricultural development, ecosystem services, and programs. Therefore, the purpose of this study, based on bibliometric analysis and the use of VOSviewer software, is the quantitative process of growth and evolution of the research published in the Web of Science database under the title of sustainable rural development from 1970 through 2023.
Methodology
To investigate the research process in the field of sustainable rural development during the period from 1970 to 2023 using the Latin term "sustainable rural development" and equivalent terms in the titles, author information, abstracts, keywords, place of publication of the article using operators Boolean was collected in WoS database. To avoid the problem of frequent database updates, all text retrieval and data loading were completed in one day (March 7, 2023). The database is the most authoritative and reliable indexing database in the world. It is generally considered one of the most influential and popular databases for bibliometric analysis because it has the largest number of articles published in indexed journals. At the same time, this database is the oldest indexing service of scientific publications, which by covering more than 12,000 scientific publications, can provide the most important and accurate research results in the field of scientometrics. To include papers published on the subject of the study, a restriction was made regarding the type of publication. By selecting only original articles, publication year from January 1, 1987 to March 7, 2023, and articles written in English, this study only included research articles in English for analysis. Other publications such as reviews, editorial documents, and various abstracts have been removed from the data by automatic filters to produce a specific output. As a result, data from 620 original articles published from 1997 to February 2023 were downloaded.
Findings
The annual growth trend during the 10 years, from 1989 to 1998, can be called the period of stagnation in the publication of articles in the field of sustainable rural development. Also, the 14 years from 2010 to 2023 can be referred to as the period of continuous growth and prosperity of research related to sustainable rural development. The number of received citations also shows a clear upward trend over time. The growth rate of publications has also been positive in the last 14 years. The top countries active in sustainable rural development studies also show that most of the research works in the field of sustainable rural development studies are concentrated in the territory of countries such as the United States of America and China. Areas such as ecology, environmental science, science technology, and business economics have the most published articles. This shows the importance of ecological studies of environmental sciences in sustainable rural development research. In the co-authorship analysis, things like the most co-authored co-authors and the analysis of the most co-authored countries were examined, and in the co-citation analysis, the authors' co-citation analysis was used to reveal the intellectual structure of the knowledge base in sustainable rural development studies and in the co-citation analysis. The most powerful references that identify active areas and identify research gaps in the field of research literature were discussed. In addition, by analyzing the strongest co-citation publications, the co-citation network of journals in the field of sustainable rural development was identified and through the frequency of citations, the most influential journals in the field of research literature were identified.
Discuss
The citation analysis of the most cited organizations in the publication of research related to sustainable rural development, out of 941 organizations, identified 5 highly cited organizations, the Chinese Academy of Sciences with 12 articles, received 374 citations and 7 total link power as the most cited organization in Publication of research related to sustainable rural development was recognized. In the citation analysis of sources, there were 290 sources or publications related to the publication of sustainable rural development research, among which 20 sources were among the most cited publications related to sustainable rural development research. With 102 articles, 47 total link power, and 1451 citations, Sustainability magazine was the best journal in terms of total link power. This journal, with the highest number of links, is the most important in publishing research related to sustainable rural development. The citation analysis of highly cited authors also shows that out of a total of 1898 authors, there are 24 highly cited authors with the highest amount of total linking power. It is interesting to note that most of the most cited authors are from China. Citation analysis of highly cited countries also shows that out of the total of 95 countries that produce publications related to sustainable rural development research, 43 countries are highly cited with the production of 5 or more articles.
Conclusion
The simultaneous analysis of the repeated keywords of the authors shows that the research on sustainable rural development can be categorized into 8 clusters sustainable development, rural development, community development, rural economy, rural tourism, agriculture, and sustainability. The perspective of future studies of sustainable rural development, which can be obtained from the overlapping analysis of the authors' keywords and the average year of publication of these words, shows that things such as rural revitalization, urbanization, sustainable development goals, and entrepreneurship are the most recent keywords. which in recent years have entered into discussions related to sustainable rural development.