Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Architecture: Heritage, Traditions and Innovations (AHTI 2022)

This article uses the analysis software VOSviewer to conduct a metrological analysis of 7,759 documents related to rural landscape research in the Web of Science core database from 2002–2021. With keywords co-occurrence and citation frequency as the main basis, this article discusses the development process, industry topics, subject field distribution, and core literature of foreign rural landscape research through scientific visual analysis and makes reasonable predictions for the future development trend of the rural landscape. The research shows that overseas research on rural landscapes has shown a steady growth trend in the past two decades. The principal topics involve environmental protection, land use, urbanization, and ecosystem services. Its core disciplines are distributed in the environmental sciences, which have become the core force in the study of the rural landscape and have gradually developed towards a trend of multidisciplinary research. Forthcoming research mainly presents three major trends: the continuous enrichment of research content, the continuous expansion of research fields and the continuous innovation of research methods.