Large-scale assessment of global green innovation research trends from 1981 to 2016: A bibliometric study

This work applies large-scale bibliometric, and visual analytic, techniques to green innovation based on the Science Citation Index Expanded and Social Science Citation Index databases over the period of 1981–2016. By analysing the basic characteristics of 2691 publications, the results of this work show that: the domain of green innovation has entered a period of exponential development; the historical development process is distinctly separated into two periods, and the former grew smoothly while the later increased dramatically.; the contributions are geographically and institutionally distinct, with the USA and University of California System the key regions performing such research; the comprehensive strength of the USA sees it rank first in the field, followed by The Netherlands and UK. Only China and India represent the developing nations among the top 15; the extent of auctorial collaboration in this area presents a clear upward trend, but institutional and national collaboration remains low and stable. Besides, distributions of geography, journals and categories, productive authors and frequently cited articles, etc. are obtained: articles in this domain are mainly distributed in the USA, China, and the UK; the most productive journal, and author are the Journal of Cleaner Production, J Blascovich (USA); Environmental Sciences Ecology is the most popular category among all of the publications surveyed; the most highly cited article was written by Laursen K and Salter A and was published in the Strategic Management Journal in 2006. Building on the frequency analysis and co-citation analysis of author keywords, it indicates that: “innovation” is the most highly used keyword; “green technology” is a new emerging topic whose upward trend is accelerating; researchers pay close attention to “environment”, as well as “sustainability”; life cycle assessment theory is the most widely used theory; “patents” as a main explanatory variable to measure technical output in econometric models is widely utilized. Finally, several suggestions for the future research are given.