A review of the first twenty-three years of articles published in the Journal of Cleaner Production: With a focus on trends, themes, collaboration networks, low/no-fossil carbon transformations and the future

Abstract

Sustainable Development (SD) has been a key theme of the contemporary world development in recent decades. The Journal of Cleaner Production (JCLP), as an international, multi-disciplinary journal, has provided a platform for the exchange of concepts, policies, and technologies to help societies to make progress towards sustainability. This article characterized the articles published in the JCLP in the context of low or no-fossil carbon transformations by employing bibliometric techniques. The analyses revealed that 4919 articles were published in JCLP in the first twenty-two years of publication, between 1993 and 2015 and that the pace of publishing increased rapidly during the last five years. Authors from China were responsible for publishing the largest number of articles and they have played key roles in the collaboration networks among the twenty countries, whose authors published the majority of JCLP’s articles Additionally, authors from Europe and the United States had strong international collaborative publication records. At the institutional level, the University of Tennessee was the university with the largest number of articles (79) and was central to the JCLP’s collaborative networking processes. By investigating the co-occurrences of keywords, some topic clusters for low-fossil carbon transformations and their distributions were identified, which were like the analyses of the research fields and trends of articles published in the JCLP. The category with the largest number of JCLP articles was the ecology/environmentally-related research with 2215 articles, followed by industrial sectors with 2215 articles, resource/energy-related research with 1905 articles, and methodology & methods with 1033 articles. The specific topical clusters under each research field were introduced and analyzed. Overall, the authors of this article anticipate that the JCLP will continue to provide a platform for multi-disciplinary, multi-cultural, multi-generational communications for academics, educators, researchers, enterprise leaders and policy-makers with the vision and mission to help to accelerate the transitions to equitable, sustainable, livable post-fossil carbon societies.