Satellite altimetry: achievements and future trends by a scientometrics analysisSatellite altimetry: achievements and future trends by a scientometrics analysis Ανασκόπηση Review 2023-10-122022enWe acknowledge the support of the Dragon 5 Cooperation (2020–2024) Project of the European Space Agency and the National Remote Sensing Center of China (NRSCC, under MOST) with Principal Investigators Prof. S. P. Mertikas (Technical University of Crete, Chania, Greece) and Prof. Mingsen Lin (NSOAS, Beijing, China).Scientometric reviews, facilitated by computational and visual analytical approaches, allow researchers to gain a thorough understanding of research trends and areas of concentration from a large number of publications. With the fast development of satellite altimetry, which has been effectively applied to a wide range of research topics, it is timely to summarize the scientific achievements of the previous 50 years and identify future trends in this field. A comprehensive overview of satellite altimetry was presented using a total of 8541 publications from the Web of Science Core Collection covering the years from 1970 to 2021. We begin by presenting the fundamental statistical results of the publications, such as the annual number of papers, study categories, countries/regions, afflictions, journals, authors, and keywords, in order to provide a comprehensive picture of satellite altimetry research. We discuss the co-occurrence of the authors in order to reveal the global collaboration network of satellite altimetry research. Finally, we utilised co-citation networks to detect the development trend and associated crucial publications for various specific topics. The findings show that satellite altimetry research has been changed immensely during the last half-century. The United States, France, China, England, and Germany made the most significant contributions in the field of satellite altimetry. The analysis reveals a clear link between technology advancements and the trend in satellite altimetry research. As a result, wide swath altimetry, GNSS-reflectometry, laser altimetry, terrestrial hydrology, and deep learning are among the most frontier study subjects. The findings of this work could guide a thorough understanding of satellite altimetry’s overall development and research front.http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Remote Sensing1414Yang_et_al_Remote Sens._14(14)_2022.pdfChania [Greece]Library of TUC2023-10-12application/pdf3.1 MBfree Yang Lei Lin Lina Fan Long Liu Na Huang Lingyong Xu Yongsheng Mertikas Stylianos Μερτικας Στυλιανος Jia Yongjun Lin Mingsen MDPI Satellite altimetry Scientometrics Bibliometrics Meta-analysis