Bibliographic Coupling Links: Alternative Approaches to Carrying Out Systematic Reviews about Renewable and Sustainable Energy

Vítor João Pereira Domingues Martinho

doi:10.3390/environments9020028

Abstract

New technologies, specifically the internet, have over the last two decades increased the number of publications in the most diverse fields of science. Subjects related to renewable and sustainable energy are no exception. These frameworks have allowed the main insights produced by the scientific community through literature surveys to be highlighted. Nonetheless, considering the vast quantity of studies, systematic approaches have been proposed by the researchers to better organize and perform the literature review. Considering the subjectivity of some of these methodologies, the main objectives of this research are to conduct a systematic review about renewable and sustainable energy through more objective techniques, based on bibliometric analysis, to provide an alternative or to complement those already available within the literature. For this purpose, a “Biblio4Review” approach was proposed in order to perform systematic reviews about renewable and sustainable energy that may spread into other scientific fields. This methodology is based on bibliographic coupling links from the bibliometric analysis to identify the most relevant studies for the literature review. The results obtained highlight that with this approach it was possible to identify the studies with greater centrality in terms of references shared. In this way, they are among the most relevant documents for these topics. Specifically for the topic considered (renewable and sustainable energy) the main insights were referred to. In any case, the findings obtained show that there is a field for more interdisciplinary approaches.

Highlights

A preliminary survey of the literature shows that research on renewable and sustainable topics is often focused on energy dimensions, revealing that there is a field for interdisciplinary approaches
To achieve the objectives proposed, 486 and 743 documents were obtained from the scientific databases Web of Science Core Collection (WoS) [1] and Scopus [84] during a search performed on 19 July 2021 for the topic “renewable and sustainable energy”
The main objectives of this study were to highlight the main insights from the literature, about the topic of renewable and sustainable energy through a systematic review supported by a more objective approach based on bibliometric analysis

Summary

Introduction

A preliminary survey of the literature shows that research on renewable and sustainable topics is often focused on energy dimensions, revealing that there is a field for interdisciplinary approaches. The studies published on WoS focused on photovoltaic approaches [2], quality control [3], renewable energy and economic dynamics [4], renewable and sustainable energy in the Asian context [5], and heat waves [6]. This search on WoS reveals that there is no document in which the topic “bibliometric” is added. This assessment highlights an interesting indication that supports the relevance of addressing the systematic reviews issue, based on bibliometric approaches on the topic of renewable and sustainable energy

Objectives

Methods

Findings

Conclusion