Bibliometric Analysis of Greenhouse Gas Research on a Global Scale from 2000 to 2014

Abstract

A bibliometric approach is used in this study for the assessment of greenhouse gas (GHG) research trends on a global scale. The relevant literature published from 2000 to 2014 in journals of all subject categories of the Science Citation Index Expanded from the Web of Science Core Collection databases has been used. The strings ‘greenhouse gas*’ or ‘green house gas*’ are used for retrieving data. The information of GHG research-related literature is analysed, including the types and languages of literature, characteristics of articles published, source countries/territories of articles, distribution of articles in different subject categories and journals, frequency/number of words in the title of articles and the frequency/number of keywords used. Over the past 15 years, an obvious growth trend is seen in the number of published articles, and countries/territories involved in the study of GHG. The number of the world articles published by the seven most developed industrialized countries (G7) is maximum in the field of GHG research. The G7 countries have played a predominant role in GHG research in the last 15 years. Analysis of the title words, author keywords and keywords plus showed that ‘greenhouse gas emission’ and ‘climate change’ were the keywords with highest frequency during the whole research period. Carbon sequestration and biotechnology have been widely used in reducing the environmental pressure of the greenhouse effect and the dependence on fossil energy.