Visualization analysis of mapping knowledge domain on Western geography of innovation

In recent years, the innovation study has received more and more attention from Western human geography scholars, and has become a new direction of Western human geography studies. Taking the Web of Science (WOS) as the literature search engine, this paper chooses 14 geography journals indexed by SSCI among the top 500 journals which published articles with the theme of innovation as literature sources. The data cover a total of 2048 English literature records associated with the innovation topic from 1982 to 2015. Based on the platform of CiteSpace which shows the relationship between evolution and structure for knowledge, we made keywords co-occurrence analysis and references co-citation analysis, and drew a map of knowledge that visualized research hotspots, intellectual base and evolution route of Western geography of innovation. We found that: firstly, there has been a significant increase in the number of the published articles and emerging keywords of Western geography of innovation, and Western Europe and North America are the two core regions of the distribution of researchers. Recent research points to hot keywords including "technology", "spillover", "cluster", "research and development", and "entrepreneurship". Secondly, the geography of innovation has an obvious evolution subject, but its research contents are broad, and the research topics have not yet focused on. "Global city", "global buzz", "spatialization pattern", "industries", "life-cycle", "Cambridge region", "knowledge", "industrial development", and "regional innovation strategies" are 9 hot topics based on the 32 most cited articles. Thirdly, the development of geography of innovation follows the orientation of economic geography, and is especially affected by the development of the new regionalism, turn trends and evolutionary economic geography, which has shown a clear evolution.