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Profile of developments in biomass-based bioenergy research: a 20-year perspective

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Abstract

In an era of energy crisis, biomass-based bioenergy research has attracted the attention of R&D managers and policy makers around the world. This study explores the structural and dynamic patterns of biomass-based bioenergy research. We measure the profile of biomass research on both macro scales (nations) and meso level (institutions) in an international context. We find that biomass publications are intensively distributed in developed regions and some emerging economies. The U.S. leads in this emerging field as evidenced by research quantity, impact, and international collaboration links. China is developing rapidly in this domain in terms of publication volume and collaborative links but suffers from low research visibility. The study also finds strong interactions are taking place both within macro-disciplines and between macro-disciplines. Research limitations are presented.

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Notes

  1. Please note since that Thomson Reuters released version 5 of SSCI in the Web of Science (WoS) in August 2011, the old original 222 subject categories in WoS 4.0 were renamed and extended to 225 Web categories. In this study, we draw overlay maps based on newly modified toolkit developed by Leydesdorff and his colleagues. For more details please refer to Leydesdorff et al. (2013).

  2. These include paper title, author name(s), author affiliations, source, publication year, cited times and other information.

  3. Such as removing duplicates based on ISI unique identifier, merging affiliations in England, Scotland, and North Ireland into the country UK, and identifying different forms of the same institution merged together (eg. the variants of the Chinese Academy of Sciences CAS and Academia Sinica), et al..

  4. ARS is a scientific in-house research agency within the Department of Agriculture.

  5. The first column of counties in Table 3 is listed in descending order based on the total publications from 1993 to 2012.

  6. Developed by Steve Borgatti, Martin Everett, and Lin Freeman, a free trial version of UCINET can be downloaded from http://www.analytictech.com/ucinet/trial.htm.

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Acknowledgments

This work is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (#71132006, #71003054, and #71303147) and China Scholarship Council. The authors are grateful to Abdullah Gok, Penghui Lv, Long Chen, and Oliver Shackleton for their helpful discussions and suggestions. The authors would also like to thank the chief editor of Scientometrics and anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Antai College of Economics and Management, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, 200052, China

    Weishu Liu, Mengdi Gu & Huchang Liao

  2. Manchester Institute of Innovation Research, Manchester Business School, University of Manchester, Manchester, M13 9PL, UK

    Weishu Liu, Chao Li & Philip Shapira

  3. School of Public Economics and Administration, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, Shanghai, 200433, China

    Guangyuan Hu & Li Tang

  4. School of Public Policy, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, 30332-0345, USA

    Philip Shapira

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  1. Weishu Liu
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  2. Mengdi Gu
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  6. Li Tang
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Correspondence to Weishu Liu.

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Liu, W., Gu, M., Hu, G. et al. Profile of developments in biomass-based bioenergy research: a 20-year perspective. Scientometrics 99, 507–521 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-013-1152-z

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