Recent progress on emergy research: A bibliometric analysis

Emergy-related studies have been widely conducted worldwide in order to evaluate the total environmental support and sustainability of one system from both natural and economic sides. Aiming to depict the characteristics of emergy-related literatures, recognize global research foci, and forecast future research directions, a complete review on the related research progresses by using a bibliometric analysis approach was performed in this study. H-index is applied to evaluate the influence of most productive journals, countries/territories, and institutions in emergy-related fields. Social network analysis is also performed to evaluate the interaction among different countries/territories and institutions. A holistic picture of the primary performance of emergy-related literatures published from 1999 to 2014 is presented. Co-word analysis reveals that emergy-based sustainability research and the integration of emergy synthesis with other methods (especially life cycle assessment) will be future research directions in emergy-related fields. Results obtained from this study can provide valuable information for researchers to better identify future hotspots in emergy-related fields.