Abstract
Global concern over energy security and climate change has resulted in the need to adopt renewable energy technologies. The sub-continent of Sub Saharan Africa (SSA) has lagged in terms of renewable energy development and research, despite having great potential for renewable energy resources. We examined emerging trends in renewable energy research in peer-reviewed publications in-order to identify research gaps, research perspectives, current knowledge and development of renewable energy research over time. We used the bibliometric mapping approach to extract and map the most frequently used keywords. This approach was useful in providing a guideline for insights on current geographic and sectoral hotspots. Temporal analysis confirmed that renewable energy publications experienced a substantial growth with biomass energy publications being the most dominant for the study period. The bibliometric maps confirmed this finding as most of the terms pertained to biomass-related topics. It is notable that there has been a shift of the discussion from the traditional sources of biomass (firewood and charcoal) to modern bio-fuel crops in SSA. From this quantitative review it was evident that the key solutions to bridging development gaps for renewable energy in SSA are interconnected. Adequate research stems from sufficient funding that results in bridging technical gaps (in terms of skill and technology), and information (data and awareness). There is a need for a suitable policy framework backed by political will, enforcement and facilitative governance framework to channel the limited resources towards maximizing gains in renewable energy development in SSA.
Highlights
Climate change remains one of the greatest challenges facing the world, especially developing countries that are the least contributors to climate change [1]
Out of the 316 publications focusing on specific countries, 14.25% focused on Kenya, 12.02% focused on Nigeria and 10.12% focused on South Africa which is in sync with renewable energy policy discussions and implementation in these countries
Our analysis suggests that countries such as Madagascar, Gabon, Democratic Republic of Congo, Chad, Niger, Central African Republic, Somalia, Benin, Cote-D'Ivoire, Togo, Rwanda and Burundi were underrepresented in renewable energy publications, with the number of publications ranging between 0 and 5 within the 26-year period
Summary
Climate change remains one of the greatest challenges facing the world, especially developing countries that are the least contributors to climate change [1]. Climate change is characterized by increases in global temperatures, sea level rise that may trigger events such as floods, droughts and heat waves [1] This has led to rapid consensus among nations worldwide to shift from traditional carbon-based energy technologies to more environmentally friendly technologies [2]. Bibliometric mapping is similar to text-mining, but the information retrieval is focused around the title, keywords, author, type of journal, year of publication and abstract. It enables the extraction of information from large amount of textual data to give an overview of the subject area [12]. Bibliometric techniques have two aspects that involve construction and the graphical representation of these maps [13]
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