Sustainability and smartness interplay within city–renewables nexus: a bibliometric analysis from 1992 to 2022

Abstract

ABSTRACT Sustainability, smartness and renewable energy represent areas of utmost importance able to contribute to the progress of urban environments. The paper investigates the interplay of these concepts, examining the scientific landscape emerging from a dataset of 2062 documents and their associated metadata downloaded from the Web of Science platform for the period between 1992 and 2022. We use VOSViewer and the R-based bibliometrix software to reveal the scientific landscape emerging from (1) the performance analysis of relevant journals and authors; (2) the intellectual and conceptual structure and (3) the evolution of the field. The research hotspots concentrate around five major clusters concerning energy consumption and carbon emissions, smart city, sustainability of cities, renewable energy and the intersection of system management with optimization in energy. Temporal analysis shows the field advances under the influence of emergent information and communication technologies applied in smart cities as well as innovations in energy harvesting that bear the capacity to improve the sustainability in cities as together they are connected to the management of energy and its efficient use. As the field appears marked by a weak relationship among the social, energy and technology spheres, this bibliometric analysis is expected to lay a foundation for future research where integrated solutions are needed to reduce the gap between the smartness and sustainability interplay in relation to cities and renewable energy.