Fletcher Tim et al. published “SUDS, LID, BMPs, WSUD and more—The evolution and application of terminology surrounding urban drainage” in
Urban Water Journal in 2015, which ranks first in citation frequency [
128]. As of 8 March 2021, this article has been co-cited 88 times. In this article, the history, application, and underlying principles of terms used in urban drainage were documented, such as low impact development (LID), water sensitive urban design (WSUD), and best management practices (BMPs), making it a summary classic. What ranks second is a review, named “Urban flood impact assessment: A state-of-the-art review”, published in 2015 by Hammond MJ et al., revealing the tangible and intangible damage of urban floods [
129]. Burns Matthew et al. [
130] systematically discussed the hydrologic shortcomings of conventional urban stormwater management by contrasting the hydrologic effects of two conventional approaches, namely drainage-efficiency-focused and pollutant-load-reduction-focused, and proposed a new approach, ranking third. Teng J. et al. [
131] summarized the advantages and limitations of the flood inundation model. The article entitled “Performance and implementation of low impact development—A review” was published by Eckart Kyle et al. in
Science of the Total Environment in 2017 [
132]. This article provides a summary of the knowledge of low impact development (LID), as well as the current state of research. Palla Anna and Ilaria Gnecco [
133] used a hydrologic model to confirm the effectiveness of LID solutions in several scenarios. Qin Huapeng et al. [
134] analyzed the effects of three LID techniques, namely swales, permeable pavements, and green roofs, by simulation experiment. In 2013, the state of art regarding stormwater management was summarized by Fletcher Tim et al. [
113], whose cited position ranks tenth, making it the only article that ranks not only in the top 10 of the total number of citations, but also in the top of co-cited articles. Ahiablame Laurent et al. [
135] discussed and evaluated the effectiveness of low impact development practices by field and laboratory studies. In addition, Hunter et al. [
136] compared the ability of six two-dimensional (2D) hydraulic models to simulate surface flows in a densely urbanized area through the simulation of a happened flood event.
2.2. Research Frontiers Analysis
The research frontier mainly discusses the emerging topics in a scientific field. It is a group of prominent concepts and potential research points. Many research frontiers may not only become research hotspots in the future under the tide of science and technology, but may also fade out of the research field after a short rise in a certain historical stage [
137,
138]. Therefore, timely identification of research frontiers in a specific field is bound to vigorously promote the development of this field. Research frontier, based on the latest academic work, refers to the collection of recently published and often cited literature in a scientific citation network from the perspective of scientometrics. Besides, concepts such as potential knowledge, emerging trends, and new research fields can also be classified as research frontiers.
In general, research frontiers represent the most advanced, innovative, and potentially important academic topics, which can be obtained from the highly cited collection of the latest literature in the scientific literature citation network. This study mainly analyzed the research frontier of the urban floods field according to the literature co-citation network relationship and drew the research frontier knowledge map of urban floods at the present stage through CiteSpace and VOSviewer, which can directly show the research frontier dynamics of the urban floods field evolving.
2.2.1. Overall Change Trend of Keywords
Research trend analysis is helpful to grasp the development of research and excavate the laws and driving forces behind the changes of research hotspots, providing direction for future research. The keywords are clustered and sorted according to time to obtain
Figure 3.
Figure 3. Overlay visualization of keywords in VOSviewer.
In this figure, it should be noted that the color of nodes is determined by the average time of each keyword year, and the bluer the node is, the earlier the research year is, while the redder the node, the more recent the research year. Researchers found that researchers paid more attention to the problem of urban floods pollution before 2015. Then, the methods of model and numerical simulation were used to research urban stormwater management, low impact development, and so on. The current studies mainly consider cities and urban vulnerability and resilience under the background of climate change and urbanization.
2.2.2. Timeline Graph Analysis
The timeline graph clearly shows the historical research results, trends, and internal relationships of each cluster unit [
139,
140]. The keywords timeline analysis of the documents from 2006 to 2021 on urban floods was carried out by CiteSpace, whose slicing time and clustering algorithm were set as one year and LLR, respectively; the keywords appearing more than 55 times in each period were extracted and clustered. As shown in
Figure 4, the horizontal axis is the time span and the vertical axis is the clustering partition. The size of the arc in the graph represents the span time of the keywords, and the number of nodes represents the internal connection degree of each keyword. In CiteSpace, different settings lead to different clustering results. Under the above settings, 48 clusters are generated. This study analyzed the first 12 clusters in order to receive acquaintance with the evolution laws of the keywords on the time axis.
Figure 4. A timeline view of keywords in CiteSpace.
The clusters with the longest duration are “urban flood”, “urban stormwater”, “urban stormwater management”, “particulate matters”, and “urban hydrology”, which existed throughout the whole study period. In addition, “best management practices”, “probability distribution”, and “diffuse pollution” existed only in the early stage of the study period, while the study of “groundwater” continued until the middle of the study period. The cross and time span between the clusters of “urban flood” and “urban stormwater” are the largest, which indicates that the relationship between them is the closest because they are the names that have been chosen for the overall field of research. In the cluster of “urban flood”, there is the largest number of bursting keywords.
2.2.3. Time Zone Chart Analysis of Keywords
The time zone graph reflects the evolution of knowledge based on the transmission relationship of research hotspots expressed by two-dimensional time location and links [
93,
141].
Figure 5 shows the time zone graph of keywords by frequency, from which researchers can find that most of the research topics in the field of urban floods, such as urban stormwater management, water quality, runoff, and so on, were carried out from 2006 to 2008. There was almost no major research hotspot in the field of urban floods research in the later stage. However, some new research focuses still exist from the relatively micro perspective. For example, urban floods risk was studied in 2011 and low impact development (LID) was adopted by a large number of scholars for research around 2014, while in 2018, the resilience of urban floods and cities became the research hotspot.
Figure 5. The evolution of subjects in the field of urban floods.
2.3. Comparative Analysis of Keywords Density Map
Researchers divided the research on the urban floods field into two stages according to the number of papers published each year. The first stage refers to the period from 2006 to 2015 and the second stage from 2016 to the present. Combined with the stage divisions, this study analyzed the changes of research hotspots in five years, that is, the first part referred to 2006–2010, the second to 2011–2015, and the third to 2016–2021. Finally, all published literature in the past three years was clustered by year, and the changes of research hotspots in each year were analyzed.
2.3.1. Comparison of Three Time Stages
The co-occurrence frequency of keywords was set to 5 times and the keywords hotspot maps of 2006–2010, 2011–2015, and 2016–2021, respectively, were obtained from VOSviewer. In
Figure 6, the yellow areas indicate the research hotspots, and the more yellow the area is, the higher the co-occurrence frequency of keywords is.
Figure 6. The density maps of the three stages’ keywords: (a) 2006–2010; (b) 2011–2015; (c) 2016–present.
It can be seen from
Figure 6, from the perspective of the number of keywords, the total number of articles published from 2006 to 2010 is the least; correspondingly, the number of keywords is the least, and the total frequency of 5 times or more is 109. The total number of published papers is the highest in 2016–2021, namely 723. From the perspective of research hotspots, the overall high-density areas in
Figure 6a are relatively small, as well as scattered, indicating that the research focus in the early research stage of the urban floods field is low and the correlation between hot spots is not so strong compared to the latter. The number of research hotspots increased and the concentration became stronger in
Figure 6b. In
Figure 6c, the research focuses are further concentrated, which is shown in the expansion of yellow areas in the figure, and different yellow areas begin to overlap to form a new bigger yellow area. This is because more and more scholars have joined in the research of the urban floods field over time, and the number of published articles gradually increased, leading to the rise of keyword co-occurrence frequency.
From the perspective of research content, the research mainly focused on “urban stormwater” and “runoff” from 2006 to 2010, and the latter covered a wide range, including “urban runoff”, “road runoff”, “urban stormwater runoff”, etc. At the same time, water quality attracted a lot of attention, such as the keywords “sediment”, “water quality”, “waste water”, etc. From 2011 to 2015, in addition to the research topic “urban storm water” and “urban flood”, the importance of management began to attract attention. Scholars used more models for simulation research, and the pollution of urban stormwater was still a hot topic, such as the keywords “pollution”, “heavy metal”, and “water quality”. Between 2016 and 2021, the second stage of the research on the whole urban floods field, researchers found that the frequency of the keywords “climate change” and “urbanization” rose rapidly, becoming prevalent in this research period, representing that researchers in the field of urban floods had been paying more and more attention to global climate change and urbanization. Moreover, “urban stormwater management” and “low impact development” have become new research hotspots. In addition, the rapid development of “resilience” and “vulnerability” is also noteworthy.
2.3.2. Comparison of the Last Three Years
The top 10 keywords of co-occurrence frequency in 2019–2021 (as of 15 June 2021, the same applies to 2021 mentioned below) are similar to those in 2016–2021.
Figure 7 shows that the top four keywords in 2019, 2020, and 2021 are all “urban flood”, “climate change”, “model”, and “impact”, while “urbanization” is likely to occupy the fifth place for a long time. Although the research on runoff is not as prevalent as that in the previous 10 years, there are still a large number of scholars studying it, which was indicated by the fact that the frequency of the keyword “runoff” in the past three years was 8, 10, and 7, respectively. Significantly, “Management”, which has been extensively studied from 2011 to 2015, still had a place in the recent three years, ranking 7, 6, and 12, respectively, in 2019, 2020, and 2021. It is worth noting that the published articles in 2021 show that the research popularity of “land use” and “SWMM (stormwater management model)” has increased sharply.
图 7.近三年关键词的密度图:( a )2019;( b ) 2020 年;( c ) 2021 年。
综上所述,研究人员可以根据现有文献数据推断,未来一定时期内,城市洪水研究将继续蓬勃发展,关键词数量将不断增加,研究重点将进一步扩大。在研究内容上,基于气候变化和城市化背景,利用SWMM等模型进行模拟研究,提出低影响发展和海绵城市的概念进行风险分析,探索城市洪水和优化甚至提出新的解决方案。同时,对洪水和城市的脆弱性和恢复力的研究也值得关注。