Analysis on the theory and practice of industrial symbiosis based on bibliometrics and social network analysis

Abstract Industrial symbiosis (IS) can generate economic, social, and environmental benefits, and support sustainable development; thus, many governments and scholars are devoted to exploring it. To analyze and evaluate the current status and development trends of industrial symbiosis, this study selects “industrial symbiosis” as a research title to search the Web of Science (core collection) database, and uses the bibliometrics and social network analysis (SNA) methods. The results turn out that an increasing amount of research has been devoted to industrial symbiosis in recent years. They also show that the study of industrial symbiosis has obvious cross-disciplinary characteristics. Current research on industrial symbiosis mainly focuses on four issues: evolution and development, operation carriers, driving mechanisms, and efficiency evaluation of industrial systems. The research of the industrial symbiosis network will greatly promote the industrial green development for the industrial transformation and upgrading of various countries. Many methods are used to examine these four questions, including case studies, life cycle assessment (LCA), material flow analysis (MFA), data envelopment analysis (DEA), multi-criteria decision making (MCDM), emergy analysis, and SNA. This article provides the trends of industrial symbiosis research for further study. The data mining can be used in the industrial symbiosis network and a dynamic simulation industry symbiotic evolutionary process model can be discussed in the future.