Journal of Environmental Management 297 (2021) 113382

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Journal of Environmental Management

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jenvman

Global evolution of research on green energy and environmental

technologies:A bibliometric study
Hao Tan a, b, Jialing Li a, *, Min He c, **, Jiayu Li d, ***, Dan Zhi e, Fanzhi Qin f, g, Chen Zhang f, g
a
School of Design, Hunan University, Changsha, Hunan, 410082, China
b
State Key Laboratory of Advanced Design and Manufacture for Vehicle Body, Hunan University, Changsha, Hunan, 410082, China
c
College of Electrical and Information Engineering, Hunan University, Changsha, 410082, China
d
School of Architecture and Art, Central South University, Changsha, 410083, China
e
College of Resources and Environment, Hunan Agricultural University, Changsha, 410128, China
f
College of Environmental Science and Engineering, Hunan University, Changsha, 410082, China
g
Key Laboratory of Environmental Biology and Pollution Control, Ministry of Education, Hunan University, Changsha, 410082, China

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Keywords: To better grasp developments and trends in research on green energy and environmental technologies, the
Environmental technologies published literatures in the Web of Science Core Collection database from 1998 to 2020 were utilized to reveal
Green energy critical information and guidance on what has been investigated, and what are the changes in research interests
Bibliometric study
using a bibliometric method. Herein, yearly quantitative distribution of literatures, author contribution and
Visualization
collaboration, productive and influential institutions and countries/territories, co-citation analysis, keywords co-
Evolution process
occurrence analysis, and research frontier identification are analyzed via information visualization technology.
The results show that the publications on green energy and environmental technologies have grown exponen­
tially, that China, the USA, and Italy are the most active countries, but the global cooperation is not close at
present. The research frontier identification results reveal that the categories of energy, wastewater, and per­
formance remain stable, while the trending up and emerging categories of catalyst and CO2 emission show clear
shift over the last decade, indicating that catalytic production of clean energy and value-added chemicals,
strategies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and other related studies to solve the global energy crisis and
environmental problems are the research frontiers. This bibliometric study provides unique insights and offers
research guidance on green energy and environmental technologies.

1. Introduction
The utilization and supply of energy is of fundamental importance to
human society and has made the greatest impact on the environment.
Although energy and environment issues are originally local problems,
they will inevitably become regional and global issues, even major po­
litical issues (Tiba and Omri, 2017). The COVID-19 outbreak has exac­
erbated the energy crisis and environmental problems for the
production, use and disposal of health and medical supplies (Jiang et al.,
2021). And the COVID-19 also revealed the crises of energy sovereignty
in several ways, indicating the inherent contradiction involved in having
for-profit entities responsible for providing services that are essential to
human life and well-being (Brosemer et al., 2020). To address and meet
the serious global energy crisis and environmental issues with an
ever-increasing human population in a still generally fossil fuel-based
society, it is inevitable to seek green, sustainable, and economically
attractive solutions (Zhang et al., 2019). The world today is undergoing
profound changes unseen in a century, and the research and develop­
ment of green energy and environmental technologies are urgently
needed.
Green energy represents all the clean sources of power that are
generated using the natural source of energy available on the planet,
mainly including biomass, solar power, wind power, hydropower, and
geothermal energy (Bhowmik et al., 2017). Political, economic, social,
and technical factors together affect the development direction of green
energy, and the key areas of green energy mainly include sustainable

* Corresponding author.
** Corresponding author.
*** Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: jialingli@hnu.edu.cn (J. Li), hemin@hnu.edu.cn (M. He), j.y.li@csu.edu.cn (J. Li).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvman.2021.113382
Received 29 April 2021; Received in revised form 6 July 2021; Accepted 23 July 2021
Available online 28 July 2021
0301-4797/© 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
H. Tan et al.
resource management (Bhowmik et al., 2017), deep transformation of
the energy system (Jacob, 2017), reducing the environmental footprint
of fossil fuels (Bello et al., 2018), and regional cooperation (Wang et al.,
2021). Xu et al. studied the influencing factors, trend predictions and
countermeasures of global renewable energy development (Xu et al.,
2019). An integration forecasting model combining differential autore­
gressive integrated moving average model, neural network model and
support vector machine model was proposed. The results indicated that
renewable energy development will be accelerated in the Asia-Pacific
region, while the US energy structure will gradually change and the
use of renewable energy will increase steadily. Meanwhile, Europe has
the fastest growth and the highest proportion in the utilization of green
energy because of its slower economic development and stricter envi­
ronmental protection systems. Recent years, the investigations of solar
energy utilization (Lewis and Nocera, 2006), biomass conversion (Gal­
lezot, 2012), CO2 emissions (Qin et al., 2020a), green building (Zhao
et al., 2019), low carbon roadmap (Ma et al., 2020), and energy policy
have developed rapidly. The development and progress of green energy
is driven by policies and regulations. Thus, the study of the change of
energy policies and regulations can also reflect the migration of research
hotspots in the field of green energy. Wang et al. carried out a
data-driven scientometric analysis based on 815 green finance and en­
ergy policy publications obtained from the Web of Science database
(Wang et al., 2021). The dynamic trends of green finance and energy
policy results revealed that in the last decade socially responsible in­
vestment, data envelopment analysis and green building were studied
extensively during the period from 2011 to 2018. While CO2 emissions,
green paradox, government subsidies and green bonds have been
booming in 2019–2020.
It is worth noting that CO2 emissions frequently appeared in various
green energy related studies and it is one of the important bridges be­
tween energy and environmental related research. Zhao et al. assessed
China’s energy poverty and its effect on CO2 emissions and found that
energy poverty accelerated the growth of CO2 emissions in China (Zhao
et al., 2021). Green energy is closely related to the development and
progress of environmental technologies, which refer to the application
of environmental sciences in developing new technologies to monitor,
conserve and reduce the harmful effects on humans, including remedi­
ation technologies (Zhang et al., 2021a, 2021b), water desalination
(Shannon et al., 2008b), cleaner production (Dong et al., 2019), etc.
(Huang et al., 2021; Qin et al., 2020b). Exponential growth of publica­
tions on green energy and environmental technologies occurred in the
last decade. However, the proposed solutions to energy crisis and
environmental problems have their limitations, such as the difficulty in
breaking through the light utilization efficiency, the high energy con­
sumption of seawater desalination, the difficulty in eradicating
non-point source pollution, the restrictive relationship between CO2
emissions and economic development, etc. Thus, with the strengthening
of the theoretical knowledge base and the development of the new
knowledge frontier, it is significant to analyze the status and identify
research frontiers in the field of green energy and environmental
technologies.
Bibliometrics is used to study of the research status and development
trend of a research field (Liu et al., 2020). How knowledge informs and
alters green energy and environmental technologies is a vibrant field,
and the type of bibliometric analysis into new insights, techniques, and
conceptual frameworks is significant (Gates et al., 2019). It inevitably
will guide the development direction of green energy and environmental
technologies. Herein, a bibliometric analysis of the publications
collected from the Web of Science Core Collection database was con­
ducted. In section 2, the data sources and research methods are elabo­
rated. In section 3, the research results and discussions are presented in
detail, including yearly quantitative distribution of literatures, author
contribution and collaboration, productive and influential institutions
and countries/territories, co-citation analysis, keywords co-occurrence
analysis, and research frontier identification. Finally, the relevant
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Journal of Environmental Management 297 (2021) 113382
conclusions and recent strides in green energy and environmental
technologies are shown in Section 4.
2. Methods
2.1. Data retrieval
Mongeon and Paul-Hus reported that most bibliometrics studies
share a common data source: Thomson Reuters’ Web of Science (WoS)
and Elsevier’s Scopus. The core set of WoS was selected as the database
to obtain the initial data, due to its groundbreaking content, high-quality
data, and long history (Mongeon and Paul-Hus, 2016). “Green Energy”
and “Environmental Technologies OR Environmental Technology” were
used as search terms connected by the Boolean operator “AND” to filter
the documents. Meanwhile, the language was restricted to English. The
raw data used in this bibliometric analysis are the contents of 2905
publications in the field of green energy and environmental technologies
obtained from the core set of WoS, which is the ISI Citation Index
database, containing a total of 8000 of the most influential
peer-reviewed journals. The data used in this research are all down­
loaded from WoS core database. Literature types include research arti­
cles, review papers and proceeding papers. Editorial materials and
corrections were excluded.
2.2. Methods
Bibliometrics has covered structural, dynamic, evaluative, and pre­
dictive scientometrics (Tan et al., 2021). Several software packages,
including CiteSpace, VOSviewer, HistCite and BibExcel, have been used
for the bibliometric analysis, each with different capabilities and limi­
tations. Herein, all these data (i.e., the annual number of publications,
authors, institutions, countries/territories, citations, etc.) were obtained
from the WoS core collection and have been analyzed after tabulation
and visual drawing. Meanwhile, knowledge domain maps for author
contribution and collaboration, journal co-citation and keyword
co-occurrence were plotted using VOSviewer (Van Eck and Waltman,
2010). Keyword timeline view was plotted using CiteSpace (Chen,
2006). Moreover, considering the lack of close correlation between au­
thors and the strong subjective randomness of the keywords given by the
authors, this paper chose the given keywords plus in the WoS system as
the research object in order to improve the accuracy of this study. The
framework of bibliometric analysis methods used in this work is
depicted in Supplementary Material (Fig. S1). The construction of
co-occurrence matrix and two-mode matrix relation is presented in
Fig. S2, explaining the mathematical models and detailed algorithms
process.
3. Results and discussion
3.1. The publication trends
Yearly quantitative distribution of publications on green energy and
environmental technologies reflects the development status, knowledge
accumulation and even the maturity of this field. Annual variation
curves for articles published on green energy and environmental tech­
nologies are shown in Fig. 1. Preliminary search finds that the first
article was published in 1998. In recent ten years, due to the global
energy crisis and environmental pollution, the related publications grow
exponentially in the field of energy and environment (Dominguez et al.,
2021; Zhang et al., 2021b). In the rapid development stage
(2012–2020), the number of publications exceeded 150, and the number
increased sharply until it reached 456 in 2020. More work is expected to
be published in the coming years, and there will be an explosion in the
number of new publications, because people have paid more attention to
energy and environmental issues. Annual publications from the top 10
countries are also presented in Fig. 1. Publications from China had a
H. Tan et al. Journal of Environmental Management 297 (2021) 113382

Fig. 1. Annual variation curves for articles published on green energy and environmental technologies. (For interpretation of the references to color in this figure
legend, the reader is referred to the Web version of this article.)

steady growth trend until 2016, and the rapid growth occurred in 2020. generally showed the trend of fluctuating growth, but other countries
The publications on green energy and environmental technologies in the had seen a larger decline in the total number of publications, which was
USA, Italy, England, India, Malaysia, Germany, Spain, and Australia affected by the outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020. Moreover, the

Fig. 2. Mapping knowledge domains of co-authors.

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H. Tan et al. Journal of Environmental Management 297 (2021) 113382

cumulative number of publications showed an exponential growth. Table 1

Top 10 institutions with the most publications in green energy and environ­
3.2. Author contribution and collaboration mental technologies.
Rank Institution Country TPa Pb TLSc CPPd He
3.2.1. Author characteristics 1 Chinese Academy China 46 1.52 25 50.43 19
The analysis of author contribution is a way to investigate the of Science %
collaboration patterns. A total of 10,347 authors were included in this 2 Tsinghua China 30 0.99 10 18.6 11
bibliometric study on green energy and environment technologies. As University %
3 The Hong Kong China 27 0.89 8 35.22 17
shown in Table S1, the top 10 authors who have the most publications in
Polytechnic %
the field of green energy and environmental technologies are listed. K. University
Zaman from Hazara University and M. Song from Anhui University of 4 Universiti Malaysia 26 0.86 11 45.42 11
Finance and Economics have each published 9 articles representing Teknologi Malaysia %
5 North China China 21 0.70 4 9.33 5
0.298 % of all selected publications, followed by B. Lin, A. Loremzo, and
Electric Power %
T. Sueyoshi. The total link strength (TLS) derived from VOSviewer re­ University
veals the number of co-authorship links with other authors. The TLS 6 University of UK 21 0.70 12 45.71 14
values indicate that the research in this field is relatively independent at Cambridge %
present and this also can be observed from Fig. 2. Among these authors, 7 Shanghai Jiao Tong China 20 0.66 8 26.8 12
University %
5 of the top 10 authors are from China. Prof. Zaman mainly focused on
8 National University Singapore 19 0.63 13 42.26 10
energy consumption, CO2 emissions and economic development (Zaman of Singapore %
and Moemen, 2017). And Prof. Song studied the relationship among 9 Polytechnic Italy 19 0.63 3 18.74 7
environment, economy, and trade. University of Turin %
10 Harbin Institute of China 18 0.60 5 27.67 9
Fig. 2 presents a knowledge domain map for the co-authorship
Technology %
network on green energy and environmental technologies. Each node
a
represents an author, and the node sizes indicates the number of co- Total Publications.
b
authored publications. Links between the nodes represents collabora­ Percentage (%).
c
tions, with greater link widths meaning closer collaborations between Total Link Strength.
d
Citations Per Paper.
authors (Tan et al., 2021). Different colors represent different clusters of e
h-index.
author cooper cooperation. As can be seen from Fig. 2, several closely
collaborating author clusters are presented, such as K. Zaman, M. Abro,
and A. Nassani. However, the different clusters are not closely related to involved in this field. The top five countries/territories are China, USA,
each other, meaning relatively little global cooperation. With the ac­ Italy, UK and India, with 837 (27.7 %), 461 (15.3 %), 196 (6.5 %), 186
celeration of global integration, the global cooperation in the field of (6.2 %), and 185 (6.1 %) publications, respectively. The nodes represent
green energy and environmental technologies will also be rapidly different countries/territories and the size of the nodes indicates the
improved. article number. Links between two nodes represent that they have a
cooperative relationship. The thicker the connection, the stronger the
3.2.2. The most productive and influential institutions cooperation between the two countries/territories. It can be observed
Information on the most productive and influential institutions can that the cooperation among China, USA, Australia, Pakistan, Singapore,
be identified by the analysis of organizational cooperation (Liu et al., South Korea is frequent. These conclusions are also consistent with the
2020). To discover the important research organizations, the top 10 data presented in Table S1.
institutions with the most publications are listed in Table 1 and the
knowledge domain map for coauthoring organizations is shown in 3.3. Co-citation analysis
Fig. 3. A total of 3072 institutions were included in this bibliometric
study on green energy and environment technologies. 6 institutions are 3.3.1. Journal co-citation analysis
from China, and Malaysia, UK, Singapore, and Italy each have one Co-citation was proposed by an intelligence scientist Henry Small,
institution in the top 10 list. Among them, Chinese Academy of Science and it means that two publications were cited together in the references
has the most publications, with the highest h-index of 19. As for TLS and of the third publication (Small, 1973). Mapped knowledge domains for
CPP, Chinese Academy of Science all ranks first, indicating an extensive journal co-citation in the field of green energy and environmental
cooperation and a higher academic influence. Knowledge domain map technologies is shown in Fig. 5. A line connecting two journals means
for the coauthoring organizations is plotted in Fig. 3. Each node repre­ that two articles from different journals are cited in the same article,
sents an institution, and the size is related to the number of publications. while the connecting line’s thickness means the strength of co-citation
The thickness of the connecting lines represents the strength of coop­ between these two journals. The biggest node is represented Journal
eration between two institutions. Chinese Academy of Science is the of Cleaner Production, indicating that Journal of Cleaner Production is
biggest node and closely related to other clusters, such as University of the most frequently cited journal with other journals. This is not only
Cambridge, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Nanyang Technological Univer­ related to the influence of the journal, but also related to the number of
sity, indicating the frequent cooperation with foreign institutions. The articles published by the journal. In the red cluster, Renewable & Sus­
bule cluster mainly includes Chinese Academy of Science, Tsinghua tainable Energy Reviews and Energy Policy also have been cited widely,
University, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Georgia and it can be indicated that review journals and policy journals generally
Institute of Technology. It also illustrates that China’s top scientific have a wider impact. As for co-citation strength, the lines connecting
research institutions have close cooperation with China’s universities among Journal of Cleaner Production, Renewable & Sustainable Energy
and top universities in the world. Reviews and Energy Policy are thicker than other lines in the red cluster,
meaning that these three journals have higher co-citation frequency
3.2.3. The most productive and influential countries/territories among each other. The blue cluster in Fig. 5 are mainly in the field of
To identify the productive and influential countries/territories environmental technologies, and Bioresource Technology, Environ­
involved in research on green energy and environmental technologies mental Science & Technology, and International Journal of Hydrogen
and the cooperation among them, countries/territories distribution is Energy have a close co-citation relationship with other journals. The red
analyzed (Fig. 4). There are as many as 80 countries/territories that are cluster mainly consists of energy related journals, while the green cluster

4
H. Tan et al.
Fig. 3. Knowledge domain map for the productive and influential institutions.
includes Nature, Science, and top journals in materials and chemistry.
The dense connecting lines indicate a high degree of activity in the
journals within the green cluster.
3.3.2. Literature co-citation analysis
To determine the distribution of the most influential publications in
the field of green energy and environmental technologies, the top 20
articles with the most citations are collected and presented in Table 2.
Fifteen of the top twenty highly cited papers were published after 2010,
indicating that the field has developed rapidly in the past decade. As for
subject, five of the top twenty publications were investigated biofuels,
and four articles were about batteries for electrical energy storage. There
are 4 and 3 articles in management research and theoretical policy
research related to energy and environment, respectively. Moreover,
two articles on the application of photocatalysis technology also deserve
our attention. The paper with the most citations (3041) is “Towards
greener and more sustainable batteries for electrical energy storage”,
written by D. Larcher and J-M. Tarascon. It provided an overview of the
current state of energy storage from a sustainability perspective, and
introduced the notion of sustainability via discussing the energy and
environmental costs of state-of-the-art lithium-ion batteries, considering
synthetic methods, abundance, scalability, and toxicity (Larcher and
Tarascon, 2015). The development bottleneck of lithium-ion battery is
the contradiction between the improvement of its energy density and its
security, and the price factor is also an important constraint on the
development of batteries. The second most cited article studied the
biofuels from microalgae including the production, processing, and ex­
tractions of biofuels and co-products (Brennan and Owende, 2010).
Producing biofuels and fine chemicals from biomass has gained great
attention for its sustainable properties. Bio-oils, syngas, and process heat
are energy-related products, while biochar as the by-product also have
been frequently studied in the field of environmental technologies and
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Journal of Environmental Management 297 (2021) 113382
green energy, including CO2 emissions (Zhang et al., 2019), contami­
nant management (Huang et al., 2021), energy storage (Liu et al., 2019),
and catalytic reactions (Lee et al., 2017). The third most cited article is
about photocatalytic technology (Wen et al., 2017). It is worth noting
that this article published in 2017 has been cited for 1159 times, fully
demonstrating that photocatalysis technology is very hot in the field of
photocatalytic hydrogen production (He et al., 2019), hydrogen
peroxide production (Torres-Pinto et al., 2019), reduction of CO2 (Qin
et al., 2020a) and degradation of environmental pollutants (Zhang et al.,
2020). Among these applications, photocatalytic hydrogen production is
the most promising technology to solve the energy crisis. However, at
present, the problems of low quantum efficiency and low solar energy
utilization rate have not been solved. Although the number of articles in
materials science has increased rapidly, photocatalytic hydrogen pro­
duction still has a long way to go.
These articles provide unambiguous answers to two key questions:
“What is the core research content of green energy and environmental
technologies?” and “What could it bring to practitioners and organiza­
tions?” Energy renewable technologies related biorefinery, photo­
catalytic hydrogen production, photocatalytic reduction of carbon
dioxide, and energy storage related research of batteries and super­
capacitors, as well as related policies and management have been the
core of research in the field of green energy and environmental tech­
nologies in recent years. Such intensive research is bound to support the
vigorous development of the new energy industry, including biofuel and
bioenergy, new energy vehicles, photocatalysis for sustainable pro­
cesses, and new materials for energy and environment.
3.4. Subject category distribution for the literature
Due to the characteristics of green energy and environmental tech­
nologies, the subject category of this subject is complex and partially
H. Tan et al.
Fig. 4. Mapping knowledge domains of coauthoring countries/territories.
coincidental. As shown in Table S2, the study of green energy and
environmental technologies involves many disciplines, including but not
limited to environmental sciences, energy fuels, green sustainable sci­
ence technology, engineering electrical electronic, materials science
multidisciplinary, economics, and chemistry multidisciplinary. And this
is an automatic classification result of the WoS database. Environmental
Sciences have the most publications with 814, accounted for a quarter of
the publications. The highest CPP belongs to chemistry multidisci­
plinary, and the value is much higher than other disciplines. The disci­
pline with the highest h-index (73) is energy fuels. In general, the
research on green energy and environmental technologies mainly fo­
cuses on the environment related disciplines. This also illustrates the
homology of energy and environmental issues.
3.5. Keywords co-occurrence analysis
Keywords co-occurrence analysis investigates the co-occurrence of
keywords in selected articles and it has been utilized to describe the core
content and structure for specific field to reveal the frontiers. Keywords
Plus obtained from the WoS was used to exclude the influence of human
subjective factors. There were 10 keywords with a frequency greater
than 99 and the VOSviewer was used for cluster analysis. Top 10 most
frequently used keywords in the field of green energy and environmental
technologies are listed in Table S3 and the visualization and analysis of
mapping knowledge domains are shown in Fig. 6. A total of 3 clusters
have been obtained. Nodes represent keywords and node size indicates
the occurrence frequency of the keyword. The thickness of connecting
line represents the strength of co-occurrence between keywords.
The cluster 1 (red) is mainly centered around the keyword “Energy”,
6
Journal of Environmental Management 297 (2021) 113382
and it has the highest occurrences, links, and TLS in cluster 1. The
keyword “Energy” is closely linked to the core keywords “Technology”
and “Performance” of cluster 2 (green). The green cluster and the red
cluster have a high level of cross fusion, indicating a higher co-
occurrence frequency. In general, the keywords in cluster 1 are mainly
about the energy and the cluster 2 consists of keywords about envi­
ronmental technologies. In the top 10 most frequently used keywords,
only one specific keyword “life-cycle assessment” appears in Table S3,
indicating that this technological means is significant in the field of
green energy and environmental technologies. Life-cycle assessment
(LCA) is a significant tool for the identification of sustainable materials
pathways by considering the burdens of materials both during produc­
tion and as a product. LCA, as a tool for better decisions, combines two
concepts. The first contains considering a product of desire and mapping
out all the involved construction, operation, and disposition, and the
second concept is to take the list of involved life-cycle activities and
account for all the associated impacts (Kirchain et al., 2017).
Hierarchical cluster analysis can directly show the closeness rela­
tionship between keywords and judge their correlation degree (Waltman
et al., 2010). In hierarchical cluster analysis mapping, the closer the
distance between keywords is, the higher the degree of similarity is,
while the keywords with longer distance will form into other branch
groups. In this study, Co-Occurrence 9.9 (COOC) software was used to
construct the two-mode matrix and conduct hierarchical cluster analysis
of high-frequency keywords and high-frequency journals. The hierar­
chical cluster analysis based on two-mode matrix effectively improves
the analysis of the traditional system clustering algorithm in a single
dimension and realizes the simultaneous clustering of topic keywords
and journals. In the clustering analysis, the distance algorithm between
H. Tan et al.
Fig. 5. Mapped knowledge domains for journal co-citation in the field of green energy and environmental technologies. (For interpretation of the references to color
in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the Web version of this article.)
samples is Euclidean distance algorithm, the clustering method is the
Ward’s mininum-variance method, and the matrix standardization
method uses Z-Score standardization. The keywords frequency limit
(≥70) and journals frequency limit (≥15) are set. Fig. 7 shows the
bi-directional clustering results of the publications in green energy and
environmental technologies. The vertical clustering tree represents the
clustering results of high-frequency keywords, and 20 high-frequency
topic words are listed at the bottom of the figure. The horizontal clus­
tering tree represents the clustering results of high-frequency journals,
and 18 high-frequency journals are listed on the right side of the picture.
Each box indicates the column-row corresponding high-frequency key­
word-journal unit, and the color depth corresponds to the frequency of
co-occurrence in publications.
The hot spots focus on six aspect: (A) Research on various kinds of
energy technology, which mainly includes “Technology” and “Energy”;
(B) Environmental technology and green energy evaluation system
research, revolving around “Life cycle assessment” and “Performance”;
(C) Study on energy consumption and emission of engineering tech­
nology, covering “CO2 emissions” and “Energy consumption”; (D)
Research and development of renewable energy, mainly including
“Renewable energy”; (E) The formulation of environmental policy and
the innovation and efficiency optimization of environmental protection
technology in the process of social sustainable development, referring
“Innovation”, “Optimization”, “Sustainability”, “Efficiency” and “Pol­
icy” etc.; (F) Study on ecological coordination, environmental man­
agement and environmental system simulation, such as “Management”,
“Green”, “System” and “Model” etc. Similarly, groups of popular jour­
nals can be also divided into six areas according to unit relevance: (I)
“Environmental science and pollution research” cluster; (II) “Energy
research and green chemistry” group; (III) “Applied energy, social pol­
icy, and technology frontier” group; (IV) “Cleaner production and ultra-
low emission” group; (V) “Sustainable development” group; (VI)
“Renewable and sustainable energy” group. Through further correlation
matching, category II and VI can also be grouped into one category,
indicating the journals group of renewable energy and green chemistry.
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Journal of Environmental Management 297 (2021) 113382
It is worth noting that A, B and F are the hottest research directions in
this field, while I, IV and V. Notably, Journal of Cleaner Production,
Sustainability, and Renewable & Sustainable Energy Reviews have sig­
nificant two-dimensional correlations with almost all keywords, espe­
cially keywords of “Technology”, “Energy”, and “Life cycle assessment”.
It can be observed that there is a strong two-dimensional connection
between the (I) journals cluster and the (C) keywords cluster, indicating
that for the requirement of carbon neutral, the intersection and inte­
gration of green energy and environment technologies will be further
upgraded.
3.6. Research frontier identification
According to the keyword timeline (Fig. 8), the development trend of
green energy and environmental technologies can be identified. The
keyword timeline presents the research progress across time for each
cluster and can be used to evaluate the research themes. The Y-axis is
keyword clusters and the X-axis is the publication year. The bigger the
node is, the stronger it bursts, and the connecting line represents the
cooccurrence relationship between keywords. All keywords are divided
into 8 categories, and each category contains several keywords.
Cluster #0 (wastewater) contains the keywords of reduction,
behavior, degradation, film, etc. Sources of wastewater include in­
dustries, homes, hospitals, farms, and businesses. The traditional
wastewater treatment technologies have been unable to meet the needs
of sustainable development, and the new wastewater treatment to ach­
ieve energy self-sufficiency, resource recovery, and wastewater regen­
eration is an important implementation path of wastewater treatment in
the future. The key to achieve energy self-sufficiency is the efficient
recovery of organic chemical energy and the use of exogenous organic
matter anaerobic co-digestion, solar energy, and wind energy. Mean­
while, the use of efficient equipment, fine operation systems and
anaerobic ammonium oxidation technology and other measures to save
energy and reduce consumption is another effective approach (Shannon
et al., 2008a).
H. Tan et al. Journal of Environmental Management 297 (2021) 113382

Table 2
Top 20 publications with the most citations in the field of green energy and environmental technologies.
Rank Title Journal Authors Year Citations IF Reference
(2019)

1 Towards greener and more sustainable batteries for Nature Chemistry D. Larcher & J-M. Tarascon 2015 3041 21.687 Larcher & Tarascon
electrical energy storage (2015)
2 Biofuels from microalgae-A review of technologies Renewable and Liam Brennan & Philip 2010 2461 12.11 Brennan & Owende
for production, processing, and extractions of Sustainable Energy Owende (2010)
biofuels and co-products Reviews
3 A review on g–C3N4–based photocatalysts Applied Surface Science Jiuqing Wen, Jun Xie, Xiaobo 2017 1159 6.182 Wen et al. (2017)
Chen & Xin Li
4 The biorefinery concept: Using biomass instead of oil Energy Conversion and Francesco Cherubini 2010 939 8.208 Cherubini (2010)
for producing energy and chemicals Management
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Reviews Jaroniec
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Management (2008)
Perspectives
7 Renewable energy policies and technological Environmental and Nick Johnstone, Ivan Haščič & 2010 615 2.286 Johnstone et al.,
innovation: evidence based on patent counts Resource Economics David Popp (2010)
8 A review of energy sources and energy management Renewable and Siang Fui Tie & Chee Wei Tan 2013 574 12.11 Tie & Tan (2013)
system in electric vehicles Sustainable Energy
Reviews
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when purchasing products Development Seonaidh McDonald &
Caroline J. Oates
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envelope components Sustainable Energy Madala & Robert F. Boehm (2011)
Reviews
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economy: An overview of carbon-neutral Hydrogen Energy Veziroğlu Veziroğlu (2008)
technologies
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Science Zhang
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promoting the development of renewable energy Dominique Finon & Marie- (2003)
Laure Lamy
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non-CO2 generating energy sources to greener Environmental Science Dolhem (2011)
electrochemical storage devices
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Theorizing about the role of incumbents and new Venturing Wüstenhagen Wüstenhagen
entrants in sustainable entrepreneurship (2010)
17 Biofuels: a technological perspective Energy & Rafael Luque, Lorenzo Herrero- 2008 392 30.289 Luque et al. (2008)
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et al.
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industrial needs and scientific literature et al.
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active materials International Edition & Tobias Janoschka et al. (2017)

In cluster #1 (energy), the basically high-frequency keywords (en­
ergy, system, model, policy, and life cycle assessment, etc.) occurred
before 2015. These results also can be identified from the top 22 key­
words with the strongest citation bursts in green energy and environ­
mental technologies (Table 3). With the deepening of energy crisis,
people pay more attention to the use of renewable energy. The cluster
#7 (renewable energy) occurred in 2012. The new installed capacity of
global renewable energy power generation reached to 161 GW in 2017,
and about 40 % was contributed by China. The grid connection of
renewable energy power generation, the breakthrough of power gen­
eration core technology and the improvement of industrial development
supporting mechanisms remain to be further improved (Qazi et al.,
2019).
Cluster #2 (catalyst) and cluster #6 (CO2 emission) almost started in
2015. CO2 emission are the focus of scientific research. The basically
high-frequency keywords also include China, energy consumption,
greenhouse gas emission, financial development, Kuznets curve, etc.
These keywords show that CO2 emissions is a scientific issue as well as
an economic and political issue, which has led to the increasing research
on CO2 reduction. Qiu et al. carried out a study on the evolution of
carbon capture and storage via knowledge mapping (Qiu and Liu, 2018),
and the results revealed that the emerging trends in carbon capture and
storage included emerging materials and techniques, evaluation of
performance, and socioeconomic analysis. These conclusions are
consistent with our research. Meanwhile, the study of photocatalytic
reduction of CO2 also has far-reaching practical significance. This is
closely related to cluster #2 (catalyst). Nano technology-based catalysts
has been widely applied in CO2 reduction, water splitting, pollutants
degradation, selective organic synthesis, etc. CO2 reduction can produce
various products, including C1 (CO, CH4, CH3OH, HCOOH, etc.), C2
(C2H4, CH3CHO, CH3CH2OH, etc.), and a small amount of C3
(CH3CH2CHO, CH3CH2CH2OH, etc.) products (Qin et al., 2020a). The
selection of catalyst is the core subject in the field of CO2 reduction,
which directly determines the reduction product yield and selectivity

8
H. Tan et al. Journal of Environmental Management 297 (2021) 113382

Fig. 6. Knowledge domain map of the Keywords co-occurrence network.

Fig. 7. Mapping knowledge domain of system clustering pedigree tree based on two-module matrix of keywords and journals.

(Schneider et al., 2012). economic factors in the field of green energy and environment tech­
Cluster #3 (efficiency), cluster #4 (performance), and cluster #5 nologies. Industry, optimization, eco innovation, growth etc. are shown
(attitude) place emphasis on the technical indicators and social/ in Cluster #3, while design, performance, information system,

9
H. Tan et al. Journal of Environmental Management 297 (2021) 113382

Fig. 8. Keyword timeline view of publications on environmental technologies and green energy from 2008 to 2020. (For interpretation of the references to color in
this figure legend, the reader is referred to the Web version of this article.)

publications in the field of green energy and environmental technolo­

Table 3
gies. The knowledge domain maps were obtained via information
Top 22 keywords with the strongest citation bursts in green energy and envi­
visualization technology. This paper reveals the research hotspots in the
ronmental technologies.
field of green energy and environmental technologies as well as the
Keywords Strength Begin End 2008–2020 development trend. The relevant conclusions are as follows:
Energy 17.03 2008 2015 ▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▂▂▂▂▂▂
System 10.77 2009 2016 ▂▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▂▂▂▂▂ (1) Green energy and environmental technologies research progress
Model 6.26 2010 2013
is roughly divided into the initial germination (before 2005), the
▂▂▃▃▃▃▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂
Performance 11.67 2011 2014 ▂▂▂▃▃▃▃▂▂▂▂▂▂▂
Life cycle assessment 4.76 2011 2014 ▂▂▂▃▃▃▃▂▂▂▂▂▂▂ primary growth (2005–2012), and the rapid development
Technology 15.16 2012 2015 ▂▂▂▂▃▃▃▃▂▂▂▂▂▂ (2012–2020). China is the most active country in the field of
Green 5.35 2013 2014 ▂▂▂▂▂▃▃▂▂▂▂▂▂▂ green energy and environmental technologies, while America,
Consumption 4.87 2013 2015 ▂▂▂▂▂▃▃▃▂▂▂▂▂▂ Italy, England, India, Malaysia, Germany, Spain, and Australia
Impact 4.24 2013 2015 ▂▂▂▂▂▃▃▃▂▂▂▂▂▂
Willingness to pay 3.57 2013 2018 ▂▂▂▂▂▃▃▃▃▃▃▂▂▂
contribute a great deal of publications. But there is still relatively
Innovation 5.93 2014 2016 ▂▂▂▂▂▂▃▃▃▂▂▂▂▂ little global cooperation at present according to the analysis of
Optimization 5.55 2014 2016 ▂▂▂▂▂▂▃▃▃▂▂▂▂▂ author contribution and collaboration.
Power 3.98 2014 2016 ▂▂▂▂▂▂▃▃▃▂▂▂▂▂ (2) As for co-citation analysis, Journal of Cleaner Production,
Policy 3.55 2014 2017
Renewable & Sustainable Energy Reviews, Energy Policy, Bio­
▂▂▂▂▂▂▃▃▃▃▂▂▂▂
Renewable energy 5.75 2015 2016 ▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▃▃▂▂▂▂▂
Generation 5.65 2015 2017 ▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▃▃▃▂▂▂▂ resource Technology, Environmental Science & Technology have
Biodiesel production 4.37 2015 2017 ▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▃▃▃▂▂▂▂ a tight co-citation relationship with other journals, which is
Storage 3.58 2016 2018 ▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▃▃▃▂▂▂ closely related to the annual number of journal papers and the
Environmental management 4.26 2017 2018 ▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▃▃▂▂▂ influence of the journal. According to the most cited articles
Nanoparticle 4.28 2018 2019 ▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▃▃▂▂
Empirical evidence 3.24 2018 2019 ▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▃▃▂▂
analysis, biofuels, batteries, photocatalysis technology, policy
Carbon dioxide emission 13.51 2018 2021 ▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▃▃▃▃ research have been the research hot spots in the last decade. It is
worth noting that researches about photocatalytic hydrogen
production, hydrogen peroxide production, CO2 reduction,
sustainability, supply chain management occurred and formed a cate­ environment pollution treatment, and even cancer treatment are
gory in cluster #4. The interactions between scientists and politicians in very hot.
the vitally important formulation and implementation of energy and (3) The research frontier identification reveals that 8 categories were
environment policies are complex and multifaceted (Watson, 2013). In classified via the bibliometric method, including wastewater,
recent years, journals devoted to energy and environmental policies energy, catalyst, efficiency, performance, attitude, CO2 emission,
have also developed rapidly. Policy will influence the development di­ and renewable energy. The categories of catalyst and CO2 emis­
rection of technology and the progress of science and technology will sion occurred in about 2015, including the keywords of hydrogen
also play a guiding role in the formulation of policy. With many coun­ production, nanoparticle, energy consumption, CO2 emission,
tries setting carbon-neutral dates, technology and policy research in the etc., indicating that catalytic hydrogen production, CO2 reduc­
field of green energy and environmental technologies will become one of tion and other related studies to solve the global energy crisis,
the focal points of human social development. global warming and other environmental problems are the
research frontiers. Meanwhile, categories (efficiency, perfor­
4. Conclusions mance, and attitude) focus on the technical indicators and social/

Herein, a bibliometric analysis was performed based on the

10
H. Tan et al.
economic factors in the field of green energy and environment
technologies also have gradually become the research hotspots.
Moreover, some constraints about the bibliometric method have
been found. (1) The data used in bibliometric analysis are important for
the accurate and comprehensive understanding of the target field or
journal. The development of publication data extraction software will be
helpful for getting more extensive and accurate base data. (2) The
methods of data pre-processing are not perfect, and the accuracy can be
further improved to reduce manual screening and merging. (3) There are
still some problems in visualization, such as cluster overlap and low
flexibility in parameter setting. (4) The correlation between cited pub­
lications and article itself has been an issue, and new technical methods
should be adopted to quantify the relevance between the cited refer­
ences and the paper to avoid the occurrence of less relevant or even
completely irrelevant references.
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial
interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence
the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgements
Thanks Xueshudiandi Team for the developing of Co-Occurrence 9.9
(COOC) software, which is made available for use free of charge. This
study was financially supported by the National Key Technologies R&D
Program of China Grant 2015BAH22F01, National Nature Science
Foundation of China grant 61772186, and Research Project of State Key
Laboratory of Advanced Design and Manufacturing for Vehicle Body,
and the Program of the National Natural Science Foundation of China
(51809090).
Appendix A. Supplementary data
Supplementary data to this article can be found online at https://doi.
org/10.1016/j.jenvman.2021.113382.
Credit author statement
Hao Tan: design of experiments, Formal analysis, Writing – original
draft and editing. Jialing Li: Supervision, designed the experiments,
Visualization, Writing – original draft: Supervision, Writing – review &
editing. Jiayu Li: Formal analysis, Visualization, Writing – original draft.
Dan Zhi: Formal analysis, Writing – original draft. Fanzhi Qin: Formal
analysis, Writing – review & editing. Chen Zhang: Formal analysis,
Writing – review & editing.
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