The evolution of Resources Conservation and Recycling over the past 30 years: A bibliometric overview

The aim of this study is to investigate the publication characteristics and development of Resources Conservation and Recycling (RCR) during its past 30 years. Through bibliometric analysis, this paper identified the most prolific authors/institutions/countries and the most cited articles, and tracked the dynamic evolution of hot topics. Besides, VOS viewer software was applied to visualize the collaboration network, journal co-citation network, and keywords co-occurrence network. The study revealed a positive trend in literature production of RCR. The most productive institution, is University of Utrecht in Netherlands, in terms of both total publication and total citations. Keywords frequency and keywords co-occurrence network analysis showed that the most prolific themes are corresponded to the basic aims and scope of the journal. The mainstream research in RCR focuses on recycling, waste management, sustainability, and environmental impact. Life cycle assessment, material flow analysis, and substance flow analysis are popular methods in recent years. Moreover, the emerging hot topics may attract great interest in future, including “food waste”, “carbon footprint”, “resource efficiency”, “circular economy”, “waste of electric and electronic”, “packaging waste”, and “China”. Knowing the objective bibliometric characteristics and the research topic evolution can serve as a useful reference for future studies, which may be of interest to the general audience.