The last century has been characterised by very fast industrialisation and population growth, causing strong outmigration from the rural territories, further increasing the socio-economic gap between the rural and urban areas. To counteract these problems, a lot of scholars have started studying rural development and the methodologies that could be applied to its evaluation. The main research objective of the present work is to investigate on a worldwide scale how rural development is being evaluated and, more in detail, to study the quantitative indicator-based approaches used for this kind of evaluation. Bibliometric analysis was performed with the aim of understanding in a better way the state of the scientific development of the research topic. Its duality, reflected by the nature of the phenomenon (negative or positive) from which the studies have origin from, has been confirmed. During the process of research has also encountered a new perspective – a more neutral one, with central concept the quality of life. Regarding the study of the quantitative indicator-based approaches, 47 selected papers have been analysed in detail and an extensive database containing 32 dimensions, 72 sub-dimensions and 892 indicators was created. Some universal dimensions and indicators have been encountered, although it cannot be known whether they are truly comparable due to the lack of transparency present in different research. For the future development and dissemination of these approaches, it is necessary to achieve greater transparency in how they are calculated and greater availability of open data.
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