Global trends of VOSviewer research, emphasizing Environment and Energy areas: A bibliometric analysis during 2000-2020

Although the bibliometric method has been widely used in a large number of sciences, no bibliometric study has been presented on the VOSviewer application as the most prominent software in this area. This study aimed to achieve a bibliometric analysis of research using VOSviewer, emphasizing “environment” and “energy” areas. Various features, including language, chronological trends, source types, subject categories, countries, source titles, affiliations, authors, and author keywords were systematically investigated. The countries’ cooperation, authors’ collaborations based on citations, the author keywords’ occurrences were constructed, visualized, and assessed through the VOSviewer. The study indicated that the number of VOSviewer-related publications has grown significantly. More than 97% of the total publication were journal articles and conference papers, while all publications in the mentioned fields have been in the form of articles. China was the leading country in publications, followed by Spain, Brazil, Italy, and the UK. As well, the USA and Spain had a large number of cooperation with other countries. Li, J., and Li, H. from China were the most cited authors. “Energy”, and “Environmental Science” were widely used areas in the most productive journals, as “Sustainability” published the most VOSviewer articles, followed by “International Journal of Environmental Research And Public Health” and “Journal of Cleaner Production”. Among the author keywords, “sustainability”, “sustainable development”, and “circular economy” could be recognized. Based on database comparison, the number of publications using the “Web of Science” database is higher than “Scopus”. However, the increase of articles published in the “Scopus” database is more.