Mapping growth and trends in the category ‘Green and Sustainable Science and Technology’

Abstract

Although the sustainability movement began to take shape in the early nineteen seventies, it was not until 1987 with the publication of the Brundtland Report that it acquired institutional recognition. The academic community’s engagement with the movement came a few years later in the form of sustainability science, which developed and consolidated in keeping with the dynamics of any new scientific discipline. This paper reviews its development and trends through an analysis of the papers listed in the Web of Science category ‘Green and Sustainable Science and Technology’. The bibliometric methodology used included social network and multivariate analysis focusing on journal, discipline and subject inter-relationships to map and analyse developments in this new field. The main findings showed that the category grew moderately until 2007 and exponentially thereafter. Four clusters of journals with different patterns of development were identified: sustainability, renewable energies, green chemistry and green ecology, with the first accounting for two-thirds of the papers published in the area. Mainstream and emerging subjects were determined on the grounds of co-word analysis.