The middle and upper atmosphere plays an important role in the solar-terrestrial space environment. It is also an important field for the study of the coupling of the thermosphere, the ionosphere and the magnetosphere. A great amount of research work in this respect was carried out both at home and abroad. With the bibliometric analysis method, this paper analyzes the development process, the main countries concerned, the key institutions, the funding and the research hotspots related with the middle and upper atmospheric density. Through the publication data analysis, it can be concluded that the annual publication in this field shows a rising trend of fluctuation. The overall global publication trend is greatly affected by the United States, Germany, China, France and the United Kingdom. The United States shares a large number of R & D institutions in this field. The University of Colorado and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration have a great scientific research capability. They have a very close scientific research cooperation with each other. Chinese institutions started related scientific researches later, but with a very rapid development. The numbers of research teams, the research achievements, and the funds have increased significantly. Important projects have been implemented, such as Shenzhou spacecraft, APOD (Atmospheric density and Precise Orbit Determination) satellites, Tiangong laboratory, and meteorological satellites for the density detection, have obtained a large amount of high-precision measured data. The density detection by multiple methods, the establishment of high-precision atmospheric models and the prediction of atmospheric density are the current research hotspots of middle and upper atmosphere researches.

middle and upper atmosphere  /  atmospheric density  /  solar-terrestrial space environment