Knowledge dynamics and sources of eco-innovation: Mapping the Green Chemistry community

•Green Chemistry (GC) is defined and characterized as an epistemic community.•By using network analysis methods, we examine the dynamics of GC scientific knowledge.•We analyze the countries/organizations involved and discuss the factors that shaped GC.•GC, strongly supported by the US EPA, has spread among a wide range of countries.•Policy and industry interests, as well as regulation, importantly shaped GC.

Over the last few decades, the interest for developing a more sustainable chemistry has increased worldwide and has triggered the proliferation of new knowledge. The present article aims at investigating the dynamics of scientific knowledge underlying this emergent field, the main countries and organizations involved, and the factors that have shaped the evolution of the field. In order to circumscribe such a still fluid area of research, we first show how an epistemic community around the concept of Green Chemistry (GC) has emerged and materialized. We then build an original dataset of scientific publications generated by this community and apply two algorithms for the analysis of citation networks. That allows us to identify and analyze the scientific knowledge that laid the foundations of the GC community and the main scientific trajectory that emerged along its whole evolution. The results highlight that the GC community, strongly supported by the US EPA, has grown exponentially since 2000 and has spread among a wide range of countries, including emerging countries. The results also suggest that policy and industry interests, as well as regulation, have played a significant role in shaping the emergence and evolution of GC.