Mapping Rural Aging-in-Place Research in China: Bibliometric Evidence from CNKI Core and CSSCI Journals, 2010–2025

Abstract

Against the complex backdrop of accelerating population aging, the reversal of aging trends between urban and rural areas, and the ongoing weakening of family caregiving functions, aging in place in rural areas presents not only a practical challenge in the development of China’s elderly care service system but also offers a context-specific empirical field for the international community to understand the institutional conditions, service boundaries, and governance logic of aging in place in rural regions. While existing research has yielded substantial findings on topics such as rural elderly care needs, home- and community-based care, integrated medical and elderly care, mutual aid-based care, and smart elderly care, there remains a lack of systematic bibliometric analysis regarding the knowledge production structure, shifts in research foci, and characteristics of collaborative networks within Chinese core academic literature on rural aging in place. This study uses a sample of 1,102 articles from Peking University Core and CSSCI journals indexed in the China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) database from 2010 to 2025. Based on clearly defined search scope, inclusion criteria, and data cleaning rules, and utilizing the CiteSpace 7.0 R1 tool, the study comprehensively employs methods such as publication volume statistics, author and institutional collaboration network analysis, keyword co-occurrence analysis, and keyword timeline mapping to examine the knowledge structure and evolutionary characteristics of research on rural in-place elderly care in China. The study found that academic attention in this field has generally undergone three phases: steady growth, rapid expansion, and fluctuating adjustment. Changes in publication volume show a relatively clear temporal correlation with the密集 issuance of national rural elderly care policies; although research actors have formed several relatively stable groups of authors and institutional nodes, cross-institutional and cross-regional collaboration remains limited; research hotspots center on high-frequency keywords such as “aging in place,” “integration of medical and elderly care,” “elderly care services,” “the elderly,” and “rural areas,” forming core conceptual clusters. The research demonstrates an evolutionary trend, gradually expanding from discussions on family-based care, aging in place, and care needs to topics such as the integration of medical and elderly care, long term care, care for the disabled elderly, and smart elderly care. The contribution of this paper lies in revealing, from.   a bibliometric perspective, the logic of knowledge evolution among policy agendas, service integration, and digital empowerment in research on rural aging in place in China, thereby providing a structured framework for subsequent theoretical construction, policy evaluation, and research on service integration mechanisms regarding rural aging in place..