Real estate research trends and most impact real estate journals: a co-citation analysis

ABSTRACT This paper identifies the main trends in real estate research on frequently cited documents on the Web of Science database for 1990–2019, using quantitative methods in document-citation analysis. From the co-citation among the most cited 44 documents, this research presents a two-dimension visual mapping structure of real estate research and its important fields globally. Using statistical analyses including (1) correlation analysis, (2) factor analysis, (3) multi-dimensional scaling, this study identifies nine research trends on reducing significance order: (1) performance and investment features of property, (2) house price – household income, consumption, and investment, (3) house price setting, (4) amenity in property valuation, (5) green factor in the property market, (6) housing discrimination and segregation, (7) urban development, (8) modelling for real estate subsector and (9) urban transformation in cities of China. A further two clusters are formed as housing and investment property with factors surrounding the two. The top five ranking journals from the cited papers are presented. Findings of the study contribute to providing insights on the multidisciplinary structure of real estate research using quantitative method of bibliometric technique. This is believed to be the first study presenting comprehensive aspects of real estate research using co-citation analysis.