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Mapping trends and knowledge structure of energy efficiency research: what we know and where we are going

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Abstract

Energy efficiency (EE) is an evolving research aspect for researchers, businesses, and policymakers for its undeniable role in meeting increasing energy demand, reducing CO2 emissions, and tackling climate change. This paper provides a review of the current state of EE research by mapping the research landscape in business and economics to understand the socioeconomic dimensions within these research areas. To identify key information, we examine the trends and characteristics of 2935 relevant scientific publications over a 30-year period from 1990 to 2019 in the Social Science Citation Index of the Web of Science database using bibliometric analysis with a R language package called ‘bibliometrix’. Our analysis shows an increasing trend in publications from 2006 onwards; the period remarkably coincides with the implementation phase of the Kyoto protocol in 2005. Accordingly, we observe that EE research has a strong association with issues like CO2 emissions, climate change, sustainability, and the growing importance of these issues in recent years. Thus, our findings provide crucial understandings by incorporating a wide array of scientific outputs in response to calls for greater theoretical clarification of EE research. These findings provide insights into the current state of the art of, and identify crucial areas for future, research. Hence, our research assists in formulating environmentally sustainable policies to tackle the adverse effects of CO2 emissions and related climate change through providing critical grasps on the scholarly development related to EE.

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Notes

  1. The concept of EE is popularly understood as ‘doing more with less,’ that is, lowering the energy requirements for a given level of economic activity (Hanley et al. 2009).

  2. A carbon tax is an excise tax imposed on the carbon content of fossil fuels to control CO2 emissions by the firms (Hájek et al. 2019; Oikonomou et al. 2008).

  3. RECP is a joint initiative the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in response to countries’ growing demand for help with the delivery of Resource Efficient and Cleaner Production services to industries through different stakeholders in over 60 developing and transition economies.

  4. Efficient World Strategy by IEA identifies where the efficiency opportunities exist and sets out the policies required to be put in place to capture them. It offers a blueprint to governments to improve their economies and lower their emissions. It also maps out how to meet key elements of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals relating to energy.

  5. Clarivate Analytics Company (Web of Science Group) Website: https://clarivate.com/webofsciencegroup/solutions/web-of-science/; accessed on 2020 February 14

  6. Global citations measure the number of citations a publication receives from the records contained in an entire database (i.e, the WoS database for the current study) (Yao et al. 2014)

  7. Multiple correspondence analysis or MCA geometrically displays data in rows and clumns in a low dimensional space, so that the proximity in the space indicates the similarities (Le Roux and Rouanet 2010). Hence, the analysis draws a conceptual structure of the field and K-means clustering to identify clusters of documents which express common concepts (Aria and Cuccurullo 2017).

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Acknowledgments

We thank two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on earlier draft of the manuscript.

Funding

This research was funded by the Long-Term Research Grant Scheme by the Ministry of Higher Education (Malaysia) and the University of Malaya, Malaysia, grant number LR001B-2016A.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Finance and Banking, Faculty of Business and Accountancy, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

    Masnun Mahi & Izlin Ismail

  2. Department of Operation and Management Information System, Faculty of Business and Accountancy, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

    Seuk Wai Phoong

  3. Department of Accountancy, Faculty of Business and Accountancy, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

    Che Ruhana Isa

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  1. Masnun Mahi
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  2. Izlin Ismail
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  3. Seuk Wai Phoong
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  4. Che Ruhana Isa
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Contributions

Conceptualization, M.M., S.W.P. and I.I.; methodology, M.M. and S.W.P; software, M.M. and S.W.P.; validation, S.W.P. and I.I.; formal analysis, M.M.; data curation, M.M.; writing - original draft preparation, M.M.; writing—review and editing, I.I. and S.W.P.; visualization, M.M..; supervision, I.I. and S.W.P.; project administration, C.R.I. and I.I; funding acquisition, C.R.I., I.I. and S.W.P.

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Correspondence to Izlin Ismail.

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Appendix

Appendix

Table 5 Most productive institutions, country affiliations, and citations (top twenty)
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Mahi, M., Ismail, I., Phoong, S.W. et al. Mapping trends and knowledge structure of energy efficiency research: what we know and where we are going. Environ Sci Pollut Res 28, 35327–35345 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-021-14367-7

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