The state of travel behavior research: A bibliometric assessment of transportation journals

Abstract

This chapter maps the landscape of travel behavior research using a bibliometric approach. To this end, we employ metadata about articles published in peer-reviewed transportation journals from the Scopus and Transport Research International Documentation (TRID) databases. Since the domain does not have a crisp boundary, we take a model-based approach to identify target papers. Specifically, we label as “travel behavior” articles from the Travel Behavior and Society journal and from certain volumes of the Transportation Research Record (based on the volume titles); then we train a naïve Bayes classifier based on the labeled articles and apply the trained model to the remaining papers. In doing so, we identify about 19,000 travel behavior papers (1970-2020). After obtaining the target papers, we summarize them using three dimensions of research space: data collection, analysis method, and application. The study analyzes how the three dimensions have evolved over the years and how they interact.