Global scientific production on GIS research by bibliometric analysis from 1997 to 2006

A bibliometric analysis was applied in this work to evaluate global scientific production of geographic information system (GIS) papers from 1997 to 2006 in any journal of all the subject categories of the Science Citation Index compiled by Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), Philadelphia, USA. ‘GIS’ and ‘geographic information system’ were used as keywords to search parts of titles, abstracts, or keywords. The published output analysis showed that GIS research steadily increased over the past 10 years and the annual paper production in 2006 was about three times 1997s paper production. There are clear distinctions among author keywords used in publications from the five most productive countries (USA, UK, Canada, Germany and China) in GIS research. Bibliometric methods could quantitatively characterize the development of global scientific production in a specific research field. The analytical results eventually provide several key findings.