A scientometric study of global electric vehicle research

A scientometric analysis was applied in this work to evaluate the status and trends of electric vehicle papers published between 1993 and 2012 in any journal of all the subject categories of the Web of Science. Electric vehicle was used as a keyword to search parts of titles, abstracts, or keywords. Publication trends were analyzed by the retrieved results in publication outputs, subject categories and publication pattern, international productivity. The document co-citation analysis was done in CitespaceII to find out the intellectual base and research fronts of electric vehicle. The articles about electric vehicle increased fast in the last 20 years. 11 document types were found in all electric vehicle-related papers and proceedings paper was the most frequently used document type. Language analysis showed that English was the most dominating language. “Engineering electrical electronic”, “Energy fuels” and “Transportation science technology” were the top three most popular subject categories. Journal of Power Sources, IEEE Transaction on Vehicular Technology and IEEE Transaction on Industrial Electronics were the representative journals in the field of electric vehicle. The USA, China and Japan were the most productive countries. University of Michigan, Harbin Institute of Technology and Ohio State University were the most productive countries. Vehicle-to-grid technology, control strategy, combination of power management and traffic information from GPS, plug-in electric vehicle, architectures and modeling, battery and policy about electric vehicle are the research fronts of electric vehicle.