Scientometric analysis of published scientific productions in the field of satellite constellations

Satellite constellations include a set of similar satellites that are distributed in a specific orbital pattern to accomplish a common mission. The satellite constellations are commonly used to accomplish missions such as global telecommunications, global positioning, and remote sensing. In this article, by using scientometric approach, the structure and scientific maps of field of "satellite constellations" in the world, as well as two leading countries, including United States and China, have been analyzed based on research documents published in this field. In addition, a comparison has been made between United States, China and the world. The research community includes all scientific documents in the field of "satellite constellations" that have been indexed in the "Scopus" database between 1969 and 2023 AD. Moreover, in this article, knowledge maps (thematic subfields) and international cooperation maps of countries have been drawn using Bibexcel and VOSViewer software. The number of documents published in this time period in the world, United States and China includes 14346, 3738 and 3369 documents, respectively. The findings of the research show that United States, China, Germany, Italy and England are leading in this field. Also, the trend of Scientific productions in this field in the world is on the rise, which shows the importance and attractiveness of this scientific field. Conference papers have the largest amount of documents published in the world and the United States; While the most documents published in China are related to articles published in journals. The top scientific production institutions in this field in the world include the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the German Aerospace Center, Wuhan University, and the European Space Research and Technology Center, respectively.