Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to sort the literatures on life cycle assessments (LCA) by their respective importance through citation and co-citation analysis and to further discuss the strengths and weaknesses of these kinds of scientometric methods in the case of LCA research.
Methods
CiteSpace II was used to generate document co-citation networks based on 3,824 articles retrieved from the ISI Web of Science database on this topic.
Results
Table 1 provides the top 50 highest cited documents in the LCA field. Here, we use two indicators, i.e., citation frequency in citation analysis and betweenness centrality metric in co-citation analysis, to measure the importance of these LCA literatures.
Conclusions
Citation and co-citation analysis are useful for environmental scientists and engineers to get a better understanding of the inner structure of LCA research. However, like all other research methods, this kind of analysis has some limitations. On the one hand, Scientometric studies and related software are very dependent on ISI Web of Science database, but considering the ISI Web of Science only began to track the LCA field fairly recently, the Scopus database would probably give a fuller picture. On the other hand, since the essence of scientometrics analysis is outsiders commenting insiders, so with only citation and co-citation analysis, to our understanding of the past, present, and future of LCA field, is insufficient.
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities of China (Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, No. 2012110044). The author is very grateful to the anonymous reviewers and editors of the International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment for their valuable comments and advices.
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Qian, G. Scientometric sorting by importance for literatures on life cycle assessments and some related methodological discussions. Int J Life Cycle Assess 19, 1462–1467 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11367-014-0747-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11367-014-0747-9