Abstract
We investigated the interdisciplinary ‘pillars’ of scientific knowledge on which the emerging field of sustainability science is founded, using a bibliometric approach and data from the Web of Science database. To find this scientific basis, we first located publications that represent a relevant part of sustainability science and then extracted the set of best cited publications, which we called the highly cited knowledge base (HCKB). To find the research orientation in this set, we inspected the occurrence of fields and contrasted this with the occurrence of fields in other publication sets relevant to sustainability science. We also created a network of co-cited HCKB publications using the seed set citations, extracted communities or clusters in this network and visualised the result. Additionally, we inspected the most cited publications in these HCKB clusters. We found that themes related to the three pillars of sustainable development (environment, economy and sociology) are all present in the HCKB, although social science (not including economics) is less visible. Finally, we found increasing diversity of fields and clusters in the citations of the seed set, indicating that the field of sustainability science is not yet moving into a more transdisciplinary state.
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Notes
A self-citation is a citation to a publication with at least one author that is also the author of the citing publication.
The WOS database has been licensed by the CWTS from its producer, Thomson Scientific.
CPP is the average number of citations per publication, without self-citations, in any set of publications (e.g. the publications of a research group or the publications in a specific set). FCS (field citation score) is the average number of citations per publication, again without self-citations, for a whole field, worldwide. It acts as an international reference level and, in the impact calculations, it is used as a normalisation for CPP, yielding the field-specific impact indicator CPP/FCSm. Almost always, a research group or any other larger set of publications covers more than one field and, therefore, we use the average FCSm. For the calculation of the FCSm, the same publication and citation-counting parameters (e.g. time window, article types) are used as in the case of CPP. For the calculation of this indicator, the WOS journal subject categories (JSCs) are used as proxies for fields.
Since a CPP/FCSm value of 1.0 means that the impact is precisely the field average, a value of 1.5 indicates a 50 % higher number of citations than the average. Based on our experience with performing bibliometric analyses, we know that a value of 1.5 can be used to identify highly cited publications.
At least five citations from within the seed set corresponds to a degree of at least five.
At the time of our analysis, these were (in alphabetical order): Agronomy for Sustainable Development; Environmental Progress & Sustainable Energy; International Journal of Agricultural Sustainability; International Journal of Sustainable Development and World Ecology; International Journal of Sustainable Transportation; Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy; Journal of Sustainable Agriculture; Journal of Sustainable Tourism; Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers: Engineering Sustainability; Renewable & Sustainable Energy Reviews; Sustainability Science; and Sustainable Development.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.
At the time we conducted our analyses, there were 246 JSCs.
This is a list composed by us on the basis of the results of many CWTS studies with NPs from scientific publications; it can be requested for research purposes from the first author of this publication.
Note that we only indicate the number of citations from the seed set; the number of citations from all WOS-covered publications may be larger.
In Fig. 1, we also show the ‘seed set knowledge base’ and ‘publications in sustainable development journals’, but we find both these sets less relevant for our investigation: the first because it is too wide and the second set because we want to focus on the knowledge base of sustainability science and have used the publications in sustainable development journals only to obtain the JKB.
In Kuhn (1970), a distinction is made between phases of ‘paradigm shifts’ and ‘normal science’. The former is a phase in which large changes in the understanding of particular topics results in a quick build-up of publications, while the latter is the phase between such changes, in which most scientific publications are produced.
These numbers were a result of a limited number of experiments with different values for these parameters.
These are relatively old publications that are used to indicate the general research background of a publication, instead of being relevant to the topics discussed in the citing publications.
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Acknowledgments
We kindly acknowledge Bert de Wit, M.Sc. and Prof. Herman Eijsackers for their help on earlier versions of this paper. In addition, we are grateful for the valuable comments by the anonymous referees of this paper, which helped to improve the focus and quality of our manuscript.
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Handled by Joanne Kauffman, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (retired), France.
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Buter, R.K., Van Raan, A.F.J. Identification and analysis of the highly cited knowledge base of sustainability science. Sustain Sci 8, 253–267 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-012-0185-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-012-0185-1