Visualization analysis of research hotspots and frontiers on factors influencing urban green innovation—Based on CiteSpace knowledge map

With the increasing call for sustainable development, cities’ demand for green innovation has also been growing. However, relatively little research summarizes the influencing factors of urban green innovation. In this study, we conducted a visual analysis of 1193 research articles on green innovation in cities from the Web of Science core database using bibliometrics and visualization analysis. By analyzing co-occurrence, co-citation, and high-frequency keywords in the literature, we explored the current research status and development trends of influencing factors of urban green innovation and summarized the research in this field. The study found that collaboration among authors and institutions in this field needs to be strengthened to a certain extent. In addition, the study identified the research hotspots and frontiers in the field of urban green innovation, including “management”, “diffusion”, “smart city”, “indicator”, “sustainable city”, “governance”, and “environmental regulation”. Among them, “management”, “governance”, “indicator”, and “internet” are the research frontiers in this field, which are expected to have profound impacts on the future development of urban green innovation. The co-citation analysis results found that China has the highest research output in this field, followed by the United States, England, Australia, and Italy. In conclusion, this study uses CiteSpace software to identify important influencing factors and development trends of urban green innovation. Urban green innovation has gradually become a norm for social and collective behavior in the process of concretization, interdisciplinary development, and technological innovation. These findings have important reference value for promoting research and practice of urban green innovation.