I publish, therefore I am. Or am I? A reply to A bibliometric investigation of life cycle assessment research in the web of science databases by Chen et al. (2014) and Mapping the scientific research on life cycle assessment: a bibliometric analysis by Hou et al. (2015)

Abstract

The International Journal of LCA recently published two articles that highlight life cycle assessment (LCA) research worldwide: Chen et al. (Int J Life Cycle Assess 19(10):1674–1685, 2014) and Hou et al. (Int J Life Cycle Assess 20(4):541–555, 2015). Both research papers conducted a bibliometric analysis using the Web of Science (WoS) database and ranked scientific journals and research institutions according to publication performances based on article counts and citation analysis. The expected outcome of this work is to contribute to a better map of global scientific LCA research— a vital tool in the field. However, the methodology used to retrieve the publications showed that many key LCA research articles were not taken into account in the surveyed literature and revealed inconsistencies related to author affiliation. By studying their research outputs, significant insights have been gained into ways to improve the indexing of scientific papers and, in turn, help researchers better disseminate and communicate their findings and overcome ranking bias.