Exploring passengers' preferences for high-speed rails: a CiteSpace bibliometric analysis

Abstract

Since passengers' preferences (PP) for high-speed rails (HSRs) play a fundamental role in optimizing service quality, enhancing user experience, and fostering the sustainable growth of HSR systems, understanding PP for HSRs becomes increasingly crucial. To determine the research status quo and reveal the emerging trends in PP for HSRs, this study for the first time conducted a bibliometric analysis underpinning PP within the HSR domain by adopting the CiteSpace software for visualization. The data was retrieved from the two wold-leading citation databases, Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus, by following the search strategies: Topic = TITLE-ABS-KEY ("high speed rail*" or "high speed train*") AND (a combination of terms that focuses on understanding preferences or choices made by passengers, travelers, commuters, tourists, or users of a transportation system), from 1998 to 2023. A total of 135 qualified articles written in English and Chinese were used for generating knowledge maps and visualization analysis of co-authorship, co-citation, and the keywords co-occurrence. The results showed (1) Francesca Pagliara is the prolific author; (2) Daniel Albalate is the highly cited author; (3) Beijing Jiaotong University (China) is the core research institution; (4) China stands as a leading place in this research field; (5) Transportation Research Part A ranked first among other high-quality journals; (6) The top keywords are air transport, China, and competition, except railroad transportation, high-speed rail/train; and (7) The "integration of air and HSR systems", "consumer behavior and demand modeling", and "transportation infrastructure and capacity" have recently attracted researchers' attention and will continue to be a focus of future research. This study contributes to helping scholars, policymakers, and stakeholders interpret and comprehend the HSRs PP state-of-the-art, providing researchers with potential academic opportunities and international collaborators, and inspiring them for future studies.