Abstract
Circular economy (CE) is a concept actively advocated by the European Union (EU), China, Japan, and the United Kingdom. At present, CE is considered to grant the most traction for companies to achieve sustainable development. However, CE is still rarely adopted by enterprises. As the backbone of the fourth industrial revolution, the digital economy (DE) is considered to have a disruptive effect. Studies have shown that digital technology has great potential in promoting the development of CE. Especially during the COVID-19 epidemic that has severely negatively affected the global economy, environment, and society, CE and DE are receiving high attention from policy makers, practitioners, and scholars around the world. However, the integration of CE and digital technology is a small and rapidly developing research field that is still in its infancy. Although there is a large amount of research in the fields of CE and DE, respectively, there are few studies that look into integrating these two fields. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to explore the research progress and trends of the integration of CE and DE, and provide an overview for future research. This paper adopts a bibliometric research method, employs the Web of Science database as its literature source, and uses VOSviewer visual software to carry out keyword co-occurrence analysis, which focuses on publication trends, journal sources, keyword visualization, multidisciplinary areas, life cycle stages, and application fields.
Highlights
The research method used in this article is a bibliometric method, which obtains reThe research method used in this article is a bibliometric method, which obtains lated publications from the Web of Science (WoS) database, and imports them into related publications from the Web of Science (WoS) database, and imports them into
The aim of this paper is to explore the current research progress and trends of the integration of circular economy (CE) and digital economy (DE)
This is achieved through obtaining related publications via the core collection of the WoS database, which are imported into VOSviewer for keyword visualization analysis to explore the relationship between CE and DE
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. The origin of the term “circular economy (CE)” is still controversial [1]. Claims that Kenneth Boulding [3] was the founder of the term, whilst Liu et al [4] and Yuan et al [5] stress that it was originally a Chinese concept. Pearce and Turner [6] believe that the term “CE” first appeared in Western literature in the 1980s. The term “CE” is associated with various meanings, it usually has a common concept, which is a circular closed-loop system [1]
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