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Visualizing the intellectual structure and evolution of carbon neutrality research: a bibliometric analysis

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Abstract

Carbon neutrality is a research hotspot and achieves increasing interests in recent years. In this paper, utilizing the Web of Science database as the data resource, we conduct a series of analyses for the carbon neutrality-related literature from the past decade based on CiteSpace, including the visualization analysis for the research hotspots and trends, discovery of intellectual structure and influential directions, as well as the cooperation analysis for representative researchers, organizations, and countries. The findings demonstrate that (a) the relationship between carbon emissions and economic growth has achieved increasing academic interests in recent years. (b) There are mainly four knowledge groups at present in this area including renewable energy and carbon emissions; international energy cooperation and investment; energy regulations and policies of different countries; technological innovation and economic growth. (c) Cooperations exist widely within various authors, institutions, as well as countries, with academic clusters developed towards the goals of energy transitions, environmental sustainability, city development, etc.

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Funding

This work was supported by Beijing Municipal Social Science Foundation (No. 21GLC042), Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 62106047 and 62273070), the Excellent Young Scholars Funding Project (No. 19YQ10) and Scientific Research Laboratory of AI Technology and Applications, University of International Business and Economics.

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  1. Qi Zhang, Yiman Xiao, Yuting Liu, Tingqin Deng, Zhenghao Li, and Rui Li contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Information Technology & Management, University of International Business & Economics, Beijing, 100010, China

    Qi Zhang, Yiman Xiao, Yuting Liu, Tingqin Deng & Zhenghao Li

  2. School of Mathematical Sciences, Dalian Universityof Technology, Dalian, 116024, China

    Rui Li

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  1. Qi Zhang
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Contributions

Qi Zhang: writing—original draft, data curation. Yiman Xiao: writing—original draft, data curation. Yuting Liu: writing—original draft, data curation. Tingqin Deng: writing—original draft, data curation. Zhenghao Li: writing—original draft, data curation. Rui Li: resources, conceptualization, writing—review and editing.

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Zhang, Q., Xiao, Y., Liu, Y. et al. Visualizing the intellectual structure and evolution of carbon neutrality research: a bibliometric analysis. Environ Sci Pollut Res 30, 75838–75862 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-023-26082-6

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