An impressive series of research in general urban metabolism has been reported widely in articles published scientific journals for several decades. The research problems, questions, objectives, approaches, results, conclusions and recommendations in those articles inspired the researchers of this paper to conduct a comprehensive literature review study. Based on a hybrid bibliometric and scientometric approach, urban metabolism articles published in Elsevier journals were quantitatively analysed and visually presented in terms of the numbers of articles published annually, the appearance frequencies and changes of key research themes, the citation features and the writers’ affiliations and contributions. Several well-known literature review techniques have been applied in this paper. This research can provide common grounds for identifying trends of UM and the results will reveal the significant research topics, the active research locations and people, the intensive publication outlets, and the distribution of bursts in different stages. This research may be extended to extensive bibliographic sources.