A Comprehensive Literature Mapping of Outdoor Healthy Environment

The rapid growth of outdoor healthy environment researches has brought challenges to traditional literature reviews. This research takes CiteSpace knowledge mapping as a means of information clustering and stratified sampling and, on this basis, integrates the traditional qualitative review to carry out rapid identification and get a full view of the main topics and trends in the massive outdoor health researches. It finds out that natural green contact and physical activity are two important ways of environment intervention on health. The researches of the two are relatively independent, and the discussions focus on 13 core aspects including health equity, empirical benefits, and neighborhood walkability and so on. Among them, natural green contact part shows the trend of expanding to more specific environmental elements, while the accumulation of macro-environmental elements in physical activity part is relatively sufficient. However, the corresponding relationship between specific environmental elements and health remains unclear. In recent years, there has been an obvious trend of intersection and integration between the two, and a unified research framework is urgently needed. On the whole, this field has presented some potential development imbalance and potential emerging hotspots. Focusing on specific environmental elements and special groups, and expanding to a wider range of outdoor space types, interdisciplinary methods are widely used in researches. The integrated research method of CiteSpace knowledge mapping, combined with qualitative analysis, also has considerable value to other fast developing fields.