An overview of climate change vulnerability: a bibliometric analysis based on Web of Science database

Based on worldwide scholars' 3004 papers published in 658 academic journals in the Web of Science (WOS) database on the topic of climate change vulnerability from 1991 to 2012, this paper quantitatively analyzes the global scientific performance and hot research areas in this field by adopting bibliometric method. The results show that (i) the vulnerability researches on climate change have experienced a rapid growth since 2006 and the publications are widely distributed in a large number of source journals while the top two productive institutions are the University of East Anglia and Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research; (ii) the cooperation at author level is on the rise and there are closer relationships in institutional and national levels; (iii) the most widely focused research topics in this field include health issues in the socioeconomic system, food security in the field of agricultural system and the issue of water resource management, etc.; (iv) according to the papers from the top journals, we find that the research areas for climate change vulnerability in those publications are located in the ecological diversity, ecosystem service, water resource management and electric power supply, etc.