Where Will ‘Water-Energy-Food’ Research Go Next?—Visualisation Review and Prospect

Abstract

Research on water, energy, and food (WEF) is gradually becoming a global research hotspot in response to threats caused by the overexploitation of resources. In this study, 13,202 documents were selected from the WoS database and CiteSpace to judge frontier development in WEF research. In this study, visualisation research was carried out in 1547 papers that are most relevant to WEF research. The results show that WEF research has gradually increased during the research period, especially since 2015. The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, Hoff, and Bazilian have the greatest influence on the promotion of WEF research and there is significant cooperation between institutions and countries. The United States, China, and the United Kingdom were the main contributors. The WEF nexus has become the most important hotspot in WEF research. In this case, 823 papers focused on the WEF nexus were selected to demonstrate the research contents, frontiers and clusters, and methods of the WEF nexus. Applied researches on the WEF nexus, such as security issues and multi-objective optimisation are current frontiers. Some new topics such as the pandemic and geopolitics have not attracted enough attention relative to their potential importance. A comprehensive data platform for the inter-department of water, energy, and food subsystems should be constructed in the near future.