Introduction

Research introduction

As a product of the digital age, cultural heritage visualisation plays a role in the conservation, exhibition and education of cultural heritage, which also contributes to its dissemination and development. The so-called cultural heritage visualisation is a subfield of the Digital Humanities. Within the Digital Humanities, the ‘Humanities’ is the discipline that is explicitly concerned with the field of cultural activities of human existence and experience, while the term ‘Digital’ refers to information stored in discrete binary form. ‘Digital’ does not just refer to all media and networked communication; information can be digital rather than online (Drucker, 2021). Digital Humanities is an interdisciplinary field that applies computer technology and methods to studying and teaching the humanities. The development of Digital Humanities stems from the spread of computer technology and digitisation, which has enabled researchers in the humanities to use computers and digital tools to manage, analyse and visualise large amounts of data and to construct digital humanities projects to study texts, history, culture and social phenomena. In recent years, digital humanities have expanded to cover several humanities disciplines, such as History, Art and especially Archaeology. The study of cultural heritage in the discipline of archaeology leads to more choices regarding visualisation.

Cultural heritage visualisation is an important research direction in the field of Digital Humanities, which provides a more intuitive and in-depth understanding of the history, culture and value of cultural heritage through digitisation, 3D reconstruction and virtual presentation of traditional artifacts. Previous research began in the late 1990s with studies on 3D virtual reconstruction (Ogleby, 1999), and subsequent studies have mostly focused on the three areas, i.e. digitisation of traditional cultural relics (Andreetto et al., 2004), 3D reconstruction of cultural relics (Bernardini et al., 2001) and virtual display in museums (Stock et al., 2007). In recent years, research has focused more on the emerging directions of progressive technologies based on original techniques, such as wearable devices and AR devices in enhancing the museum experience (Errichiello et al., 2019; Falomo Bernarduzzi et al., 2021), and new breakthroughs in emerging technologies for the preventive conservation of cultural objects (Sánchez-Aparicio et al., 2020). The impact of the global pandemic of COVID-19 has also given rise to research on virtual museum experiences (Guo et al., 2023) under the COVID-19 virtual tourism craze (Zhang et al., 2022).

The directions covered by these studies are all subsets of cultural heritage visualisation. The discipline is dynamic; thus, this study intends to use the bibliometric method, a popular and rigorous method for exploring and analysing large volumes of scientific data (Donthu et al., 2021), to map the evolution by collecting data on themes, keywords, authors, issuing institutions, journals and citations of a large body of literature in the field of cultural heritage visualisation, to explore classical themes, while shedding light on the emerging areas in that field for predicting the future development. The article proceeds to explain the disciplinary scope of cultural heritage visualisation and its broad definition, followed by research methods, results, discussion and finally a summary of the article.

The research of cultural heritage visualisation

The emergence of cultural heritage visualisation stems from the continuous exploration and innovation of traditional ways of cultural heritage conservation and dissemination. Generally, cultural relics were displayed with static text and pictures. Although such an approach conveys certain information, it cannot fully present the characteristics of the cultural relics and the historical background due to the constraints of the display sites, the state of preservation of cultural relics, and the audience viewing experience. While cultural heritage visualisation is able to present a more realistic, comprehensive and three-dimensional form, as well as the historical background of cultural heritage with digital reconstruction and virtual display, thus enhancing people’s awareness and experience. With the more and more rapidly changing of digital technology, cultural heritage visualisation is also constantly innovating and developing. In terms of time span, it started with the simple digital preservation of paintings (Barni et al., 2005), and it reconstructed paintings gradually by 3D scans based on spectroscopic techniques (Brusco et al., 2006). 3D matching algorithms had been used to identify archaeological mural fragments (Toler-FranklinCorey et al., 2010); later 3D-assisted virtualisation was used to restore the statue (Arbace et al., 2013). Technological innovations in the last decade have influenced the progress of cultural heritage visualisation significantly. In terms of research directions, it has been subdivided into conservation, exhibition and education of cultural heritage.

In cultural heritage conservation, as time changes, 3D data expansion restoration (Apollonio et al., 2018) has developed into dynamic identification-assisted restoration (Aloisio et al., 2022), since advances in technology have provided more options for cultural heritage conservation. Furthermore, preventive conservation has been using monitoring (Sánchez-Aparicio et al., 2014) tasks, 3D GIS (Campanaro et al., 2016), RS technology (Agapiou et al., 2015) and spectral imaging technology (Liu and Kazarian, 2022). Relying on such methods, visualisation techniques enable the automation of the classification, identification and preservation of cultural heritage, providing a more accurate and efficient reference and support for the preservation, restoration and display of cultural relics, while allowing people to gain a deeper understanding of details and characteristics of cultural heritage, as well as improving the efficiency and accuracy of heritage conservation and management.

In terms of cultural heritage exhibition, building a 3D virtual interactive platform for the virtual preservation and experience of craftsmanship contributes to the heritage of traditional crafts (Carrozzino et al., 2011), and digital acquisition systems have boosted organisation and archiving of cultural heritage information (Chane et al., 2013; Balletti and Ballarin, 2019). Moreover, cultural heritage visualisation contributes to both the virtual presentation of artifacts and plays a role in optimising the museum visitors’ experience. Traditional lacquerware’s shapes and textures could be presented virtually (Pasko et al., 2001). Also, 3D, 2D animation and game-developing technology have been applied to lacquerware exhibiting (Dai et al., 2009). By means of media technologies (Van Lehn, 2006) or human-computer interaction (Hatala and Wakkary, 2005; Martella et al., 2017) and visualisation of movement patterns (Lanir et al., 2016) to visit behaviour data, visitors’ museum experience is further evaluated, studied and then optimised for museum exhibitions’ planning. What’s more, with the information networks, mobile devices and AR devices, personalised museum experiences for visitors have gradually been realised (Ardissono et al., 2012; Ayala et al., 2014; Bohnert and Zukerman, 2014; Chen et al., 2014), and the X-reality technology has led to a greater sense of visitor engagement and interaction (Leopardi et al., 2021). In conclusion, cultural heritage visualisation technologies present a more realistic, comprehensive and historical background of cultural heritage, improving the heritage and exhibition effects.

In terms of cultural heritage education, cultural heritage visualisation provides schools, museums and related conservation institutions with more vivid and intuitive means of education and display (Sung et al., 2010), deepening the audience’s impression and enhancing their sense of participation and experience. For example, the cultural heritage games have progressed with technological advances and led to the derivation the VR gameplay (Anderson et al., 2010; Theodoropoulos and Antoniou, 2022). Thus, cultural heritage visualisation has provided new ways of display and dissemination for fields such as intercultural communication and cultural tourism, promoting cultural diversity and exchange.

In summary, the development of cultural heritage visualisation provides new thoughts and methods for its preservation and inheritance, offering new opportunities as well as challenges for research and innovation in the field of digital humanities. Moreover, the research also promotes the integration and innovation of digital humanities and traditional humanities, facilitating the cross-development of cultural heritage conservation and digital technology.

Study

Bibliometric approaches have firmly established themselves as scientific specialisations and are an essential component of research assessment methodology, particularly in scientific and practical disciplines (Ellegaard and Wallin, 2015). In recent years, an increasing number of researchers have chosen bibliometric software to conduct relevant research (Theodoropoulos and Antoniou, 2022). In the field of cultural heritage research, there is a bibliometric analysis of cultural heritage games (Boboc et al., 2022), the impact of the fourth industrial revolution (Alviz-Meza et al., 2022) and the application of augmented reality technologies in cultural heritage (Boboc et al., 2022). However, there is a lack of bibliometric analysis on the general direction of visualisation in the field of cultural heritage. It is in such a situation that this study conducts a bibliometric analysis based on the topic of cultural heritage visualisation. The literature analysis in this study spans the period from 1998 to 2022 with the software Biblioshiny being used, and the literature is from the Web of Science core collection within a wider range of data sources. The following questions will be answered:

  1. 1.

    What is the trend in the annual production of original papers in the years 1998 to 2023 (April)?

  2. 2.

    Who are the most cited authors?

  3. 3.

    What are the most cited research articles?

  4. 4.

    Which journals host the highest number of articles?

  5. 5.

    Which are the most contributing countries and their collaborations?

  6. 6.

    What are the trends of topics and relationship among keywords?

The bibliometric methods could discover the trend of the field and predict the frontier of future discipline development, which helps to improve the research efficiency and clarify the research direction. By searching literature information in WoS and analysing it with Biblioshiny software, this study attempts to find the relationships of research topics and hot topics among the literature to gain insight into research dynamics in the field of cultural heritage visualisation.

Methodology

This study is based on a bibliometric approach that provides a relatively objective and reliable analysis in terms of gaining a quick understanding of a field. Through a structured analysis of a large amount of literature information, it is able to infer trends over time, research topics and present results on the relevance of a large number of extant studies, among others (Donthu et al., 2021).

The literature for this study is based on the WoS core collection because of its high quality. The bibliometric software Biblioshiny can easily and precisely access the WoS core collection and process its data. This study aims to explore, mainly the direction of visualisation development in the field of cultural heritage in the last twenty-five years, therefore, the timeline was set from 1 January 1998, to 1 January 2023. The main subject terms available for the literature search were cultural relic, cultural heritage, visualisation, digital and digitisation since their high frequency of appearances in journals (Yastikli, 2007; Pavlidis et al., 2007). When cultural heritage and cultural relic were combined with visualisation, digital, and digitalisation, the terms cultural heritage digital and cultural heritage digitisation were used and searched by ‘Topic’. The flowchart of the bibliometric methodology is shown in Fig. 1. A total of 5664 results were retrieved by this method. Subsequently, to unify the types of documents for easy retrieval, the article type was filtered to ‘Article’. 3164 results were obtained after narrowing the scope again, finally became the source of analysis for this study as is shown in Fig. 1. Web pages were consulted for the latest time on 1 April 2023.

Fig. 1
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Flowchart of used bibliometric methodology.

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The graphical data in the following sections are from Biblioshiny software, which is efficient as an R-based bibliometric software in analysing large amounts of literature data, VOS software, which also plays a role in visualising the data. The file was selected as ‘Plain Text File’, and the data was selected as ‘full record and cited references’ while exported through the WoS database. The exported data was imported into the Biblioshiny (Aria and Cuccurullo, 2017) software later for bibliometric analysis.

Results

Trends in the annual production of original papers

The number of papers published on topics related to cultural heritage visualisation showed an overall slow upward trend year by year from 1998 to 2016. And 2017–2022 witnessed a more substantial increase in the number of papers published. Furthermore, the number of papers published in the statistics in 2017 was 146, which was 1.51 times more than the number of papers published in 2016, and the number of papers published every year since then has greatly increased compared to the period before 2017. In 2017, the international community demonstrated its political resolve to protect cultural heritage. UN Security Council Resolution 2347 formally recognised that the preservation of cultural heritage is essential for security (UNESCO 2023). This is one of the influencing factors for the gradual momentum of research related to cultural heritage visualisation after 2017. The overall trend is shown in Fig. 2. Fortunately, from the data, it appears that COVID-19 did not significantly affect the study. However, due to the periodicity of the study, there may be some lag in the visualisation of its impact on the results.

Fig. 2
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Annual scientific production in WoS core collection in cultural heritage visualisation in bibliometrix (1998–2023).

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Most cited authors

When measuring a researcher’s performance in each field through indicators such as the number of publications, total citations and h-index, these factors often demonstrate the significant contribution of the researcher. HIRSCH, in 2005, proposed the h-index as a single-number criterion for evaluating the scientific output of researchers. The h-index depends on the number of researchers’ publications and their impact on their peers: A researcher has index h if h of their Np papers has at least h citations each, and the other (Np-h) papers have fewer than h citations each (Bornmann and Daniel, 2005). As shown in Table 1, by using the h-index together with total citations, the top three scholars are Scopigno R (Italy), Terras M (UK) and Gonzalez-Aguilera D (Spain). Among the rest of the scholars, Cignoni P, Guidi G, Remondino F, Callieri M, Corsini M and Gigli G are all from Italy, except Aroyo L, who is from the Netherlands, which greatly reflects Italy’s strength as a pioneering country in cultural heritage preservation and its ability to build up an atmosphere of cultural heritage preservation for the whole population. In terms of the number of local citations, Remondino F and Scopigno R, both come from Italy, are still listed, and ranked first and second respectively. Besides, authors from Italy, Turkey and Greece are listed. Cultural heritage visualisation study is an even more highly relevant field to the researcher’s home country. Researchers are more likely to be involved in the studies in their home countries, which is highly dependent on the local cultural heritage endeavours and policy support, and of course the academic environment. And, these scholars, majors in imaging science and computer science, have contributed the highest number of citations to the field of cultural heritage visualisation, which shows the importance of technology in the field.

Table 1 Top 10 most local cited and relevant authors in WoS core collection in cultural heritage visualisation (1998–2023).
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Most cited research articles

As shown in Table 2, the most cited paper is the article on cultural services and ecosystems by DANIEL, TC in 2012 (Daniel et al., 2012), which tops this dataset in terms of annual citations and total citations. The research aims to better define and integrate cultural services better within the broader cultural ecosystem services framework. Cultural heritage visualisation is exactly a cultural service. GUTTENTAG, DA, focuses on the acceptance of VR as an aid to tourism, its increasing integration with tourism, the technological factors regarding its authenticity, and the risks and challenges of VR-assisted tourism related to tourists’ motivation (Guttentag, 2010). Moreover, the most frequent theme in these articles is ‘3D’ (Remondino, 2011; De Reu et al., 2013), and the application of models is a hot topic in this dataset (Murphy et al., 2013). In addition, this set of top-cited articles also indicates that virtual reality technology is more relevant to cultural heritage research (Bekele et al., 2018). Clearly, the data of the important researchers (shown in Table 1) and the most highly cited articles inform the application of 3D models and virtual technology in cultural heritage restoration and reconstruction has a broader research horizon.

Table 2 Top 10 most cited articles in WoS core collection in cultural heritage visualisation (1998–2023).
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Journals that host the highest number of articles

According to the data from the WoS core collection, Table 3 shows the journals with the highest number of articles and the highest h-index. The data show that the journal Journal Of Cultural Heritage is the leading journal in terms of the number of publications and scientific impact. Its status as a prominent journal in the field of cultural heritage visualisation is a multidisciplinary journal of science and technology for studying problems concerning the conservation and awareness of cultural heritage in a wide framework(Elsevier, n.d). The main types of accepted articles are in the following fields: Safeguarding, conservation and exploitation of cultural heritage; Heritage management and economic analyses; Computer Sciences in cultural heritage, etc. In addition, Remote Sensing, a peer-reviewed, open access journal about the science and application of remote sensing technology(MDPI, n.d), has the second highest impact, but its number of articles is far behind the second highest. It suggests that the correlation between the number of articles and the quality of the journal is not absolute, and the same is true for journals of Sustainability, Heritage and Heritage Science. The ACM Journal On Computing And Cultural Heritage, publishing papers of significant and lasting value in all areas relating to the use of information and communication technologies in support of cultural heritage(Association for Computing Machinery, n.d), has either a high number of articles or a high impact. In addition, Bradford’s law, as an empirical law describing the pattern of literature dispersion, quantitatively describing a pattern of concentration-dispersion of discipline-specific papers in relevant journals. It classifies each scientific journal as belonging to a certain disciplinary classification, and divides the journals into core, related and non-related areas dedicated to this discipline, and the number of articles in each area is equal, when the number of journals in core, related and non-related areas is in a 1: n: n2 relationship (Brookes, 1969). Table 3 shows the top ten journals in terms of the number of articles. The journals are in the core zone of the cultural heritage visualisation field described by Bradford’s law. According to Table 3, the themes of these high-quality cultural heritage visualisation-related journals demonstrate that the field is highly related to archaeological and scientific directions such as remote sensing, photogrammetry and modelling. Therefore, when considering journals for submission, the researcher can refer to this result to choose the appropriate journal.

Table 3 Top 10 journals that host most articles and highest total impact in WoS core collection in cultural heritage visualisation (1998–2023).
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Most contributing countries and their collaborations

In Table 4, the data shows that the country with the highest number of publications and the highest number of citations of research on cultural heritage visualisation is Italy. The Italian constitutional legislation guarantees the restoration and protection of the national cultural heritage, and its declaration that cultural and scientific research should be promoted (WWCD, n.d), which could be seen in its contribution to the field of research on cultural heritage visualisation, and its concept of integrating the development of high technology with cultural heritage is confirmed.

Table 4 Top 10 most contributing countries and their citations in WoS core collection in cultural heritage visualisation (1998–2023).
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China, also a major cultural heritage country, has the second-highest number of articles. However, in this data set, its total citation ranking is much lower than its publication ranking. The high number of publications appears since the Chinese government has been placing great emphasis on research related to cultural heritage preservation. In 2022, it has included common key technologies for cultural digitisation in the national key R&D programme and local science and technology programmes in China (China-cer, 2022).

The United States, on the other hand, demonstrated a high influence with the second most total citations. The United States has passed the National Historic Preservation Act since 1966, which aims to protect and preserve sites and resources of historical, architectural and cultural value, and created the National Historic Preservation Act Commission to promote the implementation and cooperation of historic preservation (National Park Service, n.d). This was even followed by the introduction of the National Heritage Areas Program; a programme designed to preserve and pass on significant cultural heritage in specific regions of the United States and to promote preservation and development through partnerships and financial support (National Park Service, n.d).

However, Belgium and Canada ranked first and second, respectively, in the average article citations, indicating a greater scientific impact on the quality of their national articles. Belgium’s cultural heritage conservation policy is under the responsibility of the Belgian federal government to protect, preserve and promote Belgium’s cultural heritage, and its related research and project support comes from the Federal Science Policy Office (Belgian Federal Science Policy Office, n.d). In Canada, on the other hand, policies and research related to cultural heritage conservation are the responsibility of Canadian Heritage, which aims to protect, preserve and promote Canada’s cultural heritage, including buildings, sites, artifacts, and traditional knowledge (Government of Canada, n.d). All these institutions have contributed significantly to the visualisation of cultural heritage research in the country.

The co-author countries in Table 5 and Fig. 3, on the other hand, confirm the negative correlation between scientific impact and authorship in international collaborations, although studies have shown that both research productivity and average output quality positively influence the degree of international collaboration achieved by researchers (Agasisti et al., 2011). This reveals the diversity of factors affecting the relationship between international cooperation and scientific impact. It is generally impossible to generalise the potential results from one factor to the other, although the degree of scientific impact or international cooperation between countries is equally important. In Italy, the cultural heritage commons are supported by institutionalised governance, policy and legal tools that allow cooperation to work in the public interest (Iaione et al., 2022). The large number of local institutions and organisations involved in the conservation and research of cultural heritage makes the degree of international cooperation in visualising cultural heritage in Italy seem modest compared to other countries. A similar situation occurs in countries with a small MCP (multiple country publications) ratio, such as China and Russia.

Table 5 Top 10 corresponding author’s countries in WoS core collection in cultural heritage visualisation (1998–2023).
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Fig. 3
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Corresponding author’s countries in WoS core collection in cultural heritage visualisation in bibliometrix (1998–2023).

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Trends of topics and relationship among keywords

The keywords are the expression of the main research direction of the article, and the overall keyword frequency of the data set reveals the research hotspots in the field. As shown in Table 6 and Fig. 4, the keyword ‘cultural heritage’ appears most frequently as the topic of cultural heritage visualisation, while the keyword ‘documentation’ also shows the dependence on documentation in the field of cultural heritage visualisation. The use of digital means to preserve documentation, which is also classified as visualisation research. The keyword photogrammetry is heavily studied and applied as a visualisation tool, and the same is for the keywords design and model. The above statement is more evident in Table 5, where the keywords communication, management, user, registration and quantification are used to reflect the research related to personalised museum services (Vom Lehn, 2006; Hatala and Wakkary, 2005; Martella et al., 2017; Lanir et al., 2017). Online, reality, models, technologies, Internet, networks and search suggest the technological attributes and technological core of cultural heritage visualisation. For example, researchers such as MAURICE, M have created orthographic and 3D models for the analysis and preservation of historic objects, structures and environments (Murphy et al., 2013). In addition, cultural heritage visualisation plays a role in the conservation, exhibition and education of cultural heritage, which has been shown in Fig. 5.

Table 6 Top 10 most frequent words in WoS core collection in cultural heritage visualisation (1998–2023).
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Fig. 4
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Words cloud of authors’ keywords in WoS core collection in cultural heritage visualisation in bibliometrix (1998–2023).

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Fig. 5
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Keywords most used by authors in WoS core collection in cultural heritage visualisation in VOSviewer (1998–2023).

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Discussion

Based on the analysis of the six research questions above, we found that the production of original papers in the visualisation of the cultural heritage is currently in a state of linear growth. A minimum of 10 published papers with more than 513 citations is required to be one of the most cited authors. Furthermore, the most cited article is on the contributions of cultural services to the ecosystem services agenda, which demonstrates the extremely high service nature of the cultural heritage visualisation field. Furthermore, the premier journal for cultural heritage visualisation research is the Journal Of Cultural Heritage. Italy and China are the two countries with the highest number of publications, Italy and the United States have the first and second highest total citations, while Belgium and Canada have the highest average citations. And the relationship between the number of national publications, the scientific impact and the degree of international cooperation between countries is complex and influences each other. Moreover, the keywords ‘photogrammetry’, ‘visualisation’ and ‘management’ in this field of research appear most.

This study aimed to conduct a bibliometric analysis of research topics related to cultural heritage visualisation published in the WoS Core Collection from 1998 to April 2023, including data for the last 25 years. The data reported in this paper reveals some interesting findings: over the last 25 years covered by this study, it is clear that research on cultural heritage visualisation has become increasingly common worldwide, and the number of the related research papers has shown a steady growth. Thus, there is an overall upward trend in the level of research and scientific impact in the field.

Table 1 shows that Scopigno, R is one of the most prominent contributors in the field of cultural heritage visualisation. Coming from Italy, he focuses on the fields of Computer Science, Imaging Science and Photographic Technology. His number of publications, citations and h-index are all high among his peers. The most cited articles related to cultural heritage visualisation are those on the 3D-assisted restoration of fragmented artifacts (Arbace et al., 2013).

In addition, REMONDINO F, also from Italy, is the most cited researcher in this field. His main research areas are Imaging Science, Photographic Technology and Computer Science, with highly cited articles focusing on 3D modelling and image-related research (Nex and Remondino, 2014; Remondino and El-Hakim, 2006; Remondino, 2011). However, his h-index is not as outstanding compared to his peers in cultural heritage visualisation. This suggests that high citation numbers do not necessarily translate to a high h-index, indicating that citation numbers and impact are not equivalent. The number of citations is not only related to the relevance of the study but also influenced by the accessibility, dissemination and scientific authority of the article (Repiso et al., 2021).

TERRAS M, from the UK, focuses on Arts & Humanities, Linguistics, Information Science & Library Science and Computer Science. Despite these areas not being highly relevant to cultural heritage visualisation, TERRAS M still has a high h-index and citation count in the field. Similarly, GONZALEZ-AGUILERA D, a Spanish scholar specialising in Geology, Engineering and Remote Sensing, and CIGNONI P, an Italian scholar in Computer Science, Engineering and Arts & Humanities, also have high citation counts. GUIDI G, a researcher in Radiology, follows the same pattern.

It is interesting to note that almost all the highly cited authors are from European countries, which is closely related to their early and advanced scientific and technological strengths and cultural heritage preservation policies.

Even though the number of articles in the field of cultural heritage visualisation is relatively low compared to other popular fields in terms of the volume of literature citations, the scientific impact remains high, as evidenced by the h-index. Interestingly, the most cited article on the contribution of cultural services to the ecosystem services agenda was not published in the Journal Of Cultural Heritage, the most influential journal in the field, and it was not on the same topic as most articles in that journal. This partly indicates that the positive correlation between top journals in the relevant field and the scientific impact of an article is not always the highest.

Among the countries with the most publications, Italy and China rank first and second in terms of the number of articles. However, Italy and the United States have the highest number of citations. In addition to the traditional benefits of being a large cultural heritage country, the economic development factor largely determines the progressiveness of cultural research endeavours. This is why Canada and Belgium have the highest average number of citations despite not having as much cultural heritage as some other countries.

The attitude of some governments towards the cultural industry is also an important variable. For example, China, as a developing country, has the second highest number of publications due in part to its government’s supportive stance on cultural research. Rome 1930, The International Conference on the Scientific Analysis of Artworks, and its legacy in Italy introduced many first-of-its-kind ideas that were exemplary internationally. Moreover, the Italian government has always prioritised a ‘cultural heritage first’ policy in construction projects, strengthening Italy’s position in cultural heritage preservation.

In addition, compared with other countries with numerous publications and citations, studies in China mainly focus on ancient objects, which belong to a different category. For instance, studies on easel paintings and frescos are quite popular in European countries, while in China, research interests often focus on murals or traditional Chinese paintings on paper or silk. Despite being written in English and accessible to other researchers, the unique materials and techniques used in Chinese artworks result in a high number of publications but do not lead to a similar trend in citations.

The top ten corresponding authors’ countries show that although the number of articles is not the highest, France, the United Kingdom and Australia each exhibit the highest MCP ratios. This suggests that, in addition to the number of cultural heritage sites, scientific and technological powerhouses are a major attraction for research on cultural heritage visualisations. This is mainly due to the reliance on and co-evolution with scientific and technological approaches for visualisation research.

As shown in Fig. 5, many of the keywords such as ‘technology’, ‘museum’, ‘cultural’, ‘experience’ and ‘practice’ have flourished. These keywords have always been fundamental components of cultural heritage visualisation research. Over time, new keywords like ‘open data’, ‘digital humanity’, ‘app’ and ‘covid’ have also begun to appear in the field. This demonstrates that the visualisation of cultural heritage is an extremely inclusive field of research, where many different disciplines intersect and contribute to the development of the entire field.

In general, this study provides a research pathway for the digitisation and visualisation of cultural heritage through bibliometric analysis, facilitating subsequent research for other researchers. As shown in the Thematic Map in Fig. 6, the horizontal axis represents the degree of relevance, and the vertical axis represents the degree of development.

Fig. 6
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Trends in WoS core collection in cultural heritage visualisation in bibliometrix (1998–2023).

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The motor themes, which indicate themes that are both important and well-developed, are not yet found in this set of cultural heritage visualisation data. The niche themes, on the other hand, represent themes that have developed well but are not currently important for the field. Themes such as paintings, identification and pigment studies, which demonstrate the impact of technology on museums and their contribution to heritage conservation, are present in this quadrant.

The emerging or declining themes represent marginal themes that are not well-developed, may be emerging, or may be disappearing. No relevant themes were found in this dataset either. The basic and transversal themes are important to the field but not well-developed, generally referring to basic concepts. Traditional visualisation studies such as photogrammetry and documentation are in this quadrant, as are studies on management and models. The cultural heritage research on management and models also exists as basic themes.

Overall, although cultural heritage visualisation has been developing for some time in response to technological advances, the analysis of this data suggests that more time is needed to further expand the themes and content of the research to mature the field. However, due to this relatively short period of development, declining themes have been largely absent, allowing cultural heritage visualisation to explore the boundaries of the field by engaging with emerging themes.

Conclusions

This study shows that there has been an increasing interest in cultural heritage visualisation research by countries, journals and researchers over the last 25 years. Using data from the WoS core collection and performing bibliometric analysis with Biblioshiny, the main conclusions of this study are as follows:

  • The production of original papers in the field of visualisation of the cultural heritage under study is currently in a state of linear growth.

  • A minimum of 10 published papers with more than 513 citations is required to be one of the most cited authors in the field of cultural heritage visualisation.

  • The most cited article is on the contributions of cultural services to the ecosystem services agenda, which demonstrates the extremely high service nature of the cultural heritage visualisation field.

  • The premier journal for cultural heritage visualisation research is Journal Of Cultural Heritage.

  • Italy and China are the two countries with the highest number of publications, Italy and the United States have the first and second highest total citations, while Belgium and Canada have the highest average citations. Moreover, the relationship between the number of national publications, the scientific impact and the degree of international cooperation between countries is complex and influences each other.

  • The keywords ‘photogrammetry’, ‘visualisation’ and ‘management’ in this field of research correspond to cultural heritage or cultural heritage research. They correspond to cultural heritage studies in conservation, exhibition and education.

To sum up, the future of cultural heritage visualisation research will further develop in terms of more realistic visualisation techniques and more intelligent conservation techniques, which are based on technological discoveries. The wider scope of application and multi-disciplinary cooperation are mainly due to the inclusiveness and dependence of cultural heritage visualisation research on other disciplines.

This study does want to explore the research as comprehensively as possible, however, there are still some limitations. The first is that the database is incomplete, and the data analysed in this paper are only from the WoS core collection. Secondly, the subject terms and keywords of the articles from WoS were searched broadly in accessing raw data made some of the articles have not high relevance to the topic, which led to the analysis being prone to the problem of highly cited articles being only partially relevant to the topic of the study in this paper, such as the highest cited article was from Daniel’s study on cultural systems (Daniels et al., 2012).

Nonetheless, this study provides a groundbreaking bibliometric assessment of research related to cultural heritage visualisation and a clear overview of global publications in this field. Therefore, it can be helpful to researchers in this field in terms of research content and direction, and the findings of this paper are of some overview significance for cultural heritage visualisation research.