The landscape of academic articles in environmental footprint family research: A bibliometric analysis during 1996–2018

Abstract Research on environmental footprint family is useful and meaningful for evaluating environmental performance, which has aroused the increasing attentions of the public, policymakers, and researchers in recent years. Unlike previous studies regarding as a single indicator, the present paper covers various footprint indicators to investigate the overview of the environmental footprint family field using a bibliometric analysis. Two datasets, including all articles and top-cited articles, from the Web of Science Core Collection database between 1996 and 2018 were reviewed. These 668 top-cited articles were considered to analyse four important aspects of the EFF publication performance including journals, authors, institutions, and countries/regions by introducing some quantitative indicators both in quantity and quality. The present study shows the top 16 journals, top 15 scholars, 19 most productive institutions, and 15 most influential countries/regions. Moreover, the present paper analyses the hot issues, research fronts, and future research in the field of environmental footprint family based on all 6680 articles. Using keywords of these publications, we can conclude that life cycle assessment and carbon footprint are the most important topics in this field. The related results of bibliometric analysis will provide a current state and systemic overview of this field, which is helpful for the future researchers to promote the development of the environmental footprint family research.