Full text

Turn on search term navigation

© 2025 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.

Abstract

The Three-North Shelter Forest Program (TNSFP) is a large-scale ecological restoration project that has attracted worldwide attention. It covers 4.069 million km2 across 13 provinces in northern China, including northwestern, north-central, and northeastern regions. Bibliometric analysis provides a structural overview of the research in this field and offers insights into key research fronts. We conducted a literature review of the Web of Science Core Collection (WoSCC) from 1990 to 2024 using HistCite for a comprehensive literature analysis and CiteSpace for visualizing research trends and co-citation networks. Based on the literature data from the WoSCC, we performed a bibliometric visualization review of the TNSFP. We observe a rising trend in research on the TNSFP, with the number of publications steadily increasing, especially after 2011. Remote Sensing emerged as the leading journal during the study period, accounting for 8.84% of the total publications. China is the leading contributor to research in this field, comprising 99.32% of the publications, with the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) being the primary research institution, accounting for 36.05%. Research on the TNSFP is interdisciplinary, with Environmental Sciences serving as its primary focus. Ecological restoration and climate change are likely to be the main trends in future research. This study provides a comprehensive overview of the TNSFP’s research landscape, offering insights that can inform policy decisions, guide future research directions, and support on-the-ground conservation and afforestation strategies.

Details

Title
A Bibliometric Analysis of the Three-North Shelter Forest Program
Author
Sun, Bing 1 ; Liu Jinxiu 2 ; Zhang Xingjian 1 

 School of Information Engineering, China University of Geosciences, Beijing 100083, China; [email protected] (B.S.); [email protected] (X.Z.) 
 School of Information Engineering, China University of Geosciences, Beijing 100083, China; [email protected] (B.S.); [email protected] (X.Z.), Hebei Key Laboratory of Geospatial Digital Twin and Collaborative Optimization, China University of Geosciences Beijing, Beijing 100083, China 
First page
977
Publication year
2025
Publication date
2025
Publisher
MDPI AG
e-ISSN
19994907
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
ProQuest document ID
3223910676
Copyright
© 2025 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.