An exploration of trends and future directions in sustainability performance: A bibliometric analysis of Scopus database

Data source and search strategy

First, the research theme of sustainability performance was defined. Furthermore, this study aims to explore worldwide research tendency in sustainability performance to identify gaps and make research recommendations. Based on the research question and objectives, the article searching keywords were established. The full search strategy, retrieved by topic = “sustainability performance” or “triple bottom line” or “TBL”. The timespan is 1997–2021, and the retrieval time was 13 October 2021.

The present paper was based on the Scopus database core collection to guarantee the data’s scientific and completeness. Scopus is the largest database of abstracts and citations, with 1.4 billion citations and 16 million author data³⁵. The Scopus database is superior to similar alternatives since it indexes approximately 70% more sources³⁶. It gives more thorough coverage of the newest literature, according to 37.

After the research searching keywords were chosen, the inclusion criteria (IC) were constructed. There were four criteria for inclusion:

The inclusion criteria contributed to the selection of articles, with only those that met all of them being chosen.

Process of selecting articles

Posterior to the initial search, we completed screening practically and methodologically to guarantee the correlation of literature, during which it needed to involve ⩾ 1 keyword aforementioned in the topics, abstracts, keywords. Our team completed the initial selection for approximately 5428 literature and afterwards discussed the outcomes to generate consensus. Subsequently, we reviewed the entire databases and checked associations via reading the abstracts when necessary. As a result, the 3687 articles were identified through Search Filters 1 (SF1), which read the title, abstract, and keywords. Only articles that demonstrated potential for achieving the four inclusion criteria cleared SF1 (IC1, IC2, IC3 and IC4). Afterwards, there were 3680 articles retrieved after full reading (SF2). The procedure of study inclusion and record exclusion was presented in Table 1. Please note that the full list of included studies is available in Underlying data.

Data analysis method

After data selection, there were a total of 3680 articles extracted for analysis. Furthermore, with the fast advancement of data mining, informational analyses and graphics rendering techniques, it’s probable to utilise computers to study substantial literature data and complete data expression via visualising data results³⁸. This research will use this kind of bibliometric analysis tool, VOSviewer, to perform a quantitative analysis of the relevant literature³⁹.

Van Eck and Waltman of Leiden University in the Netherlands created VOSviewer, a program for constructing and visualizing econometrical networks. It’s capable of creating a corresponding knowledge map, identifying the research area’s knowledge base, and providing the most up-to-date progress in related research, as well as frontier hotspots, evolution paths, and future development trends in sustainability performance research, all of which are intended to serve as references and a foundation for future research³⁸.

Literature development trends

As presented by Figure 2, for the period of almost 24 years, 3680 papers were published, given the limitations in the search string. The results obtained from the preliminary analysis revealed that the oldest publication was dated 1997. The trends of the quantity of the literature witnessed relatively low before the year 2001. However, it increased gradually from then on, which showed there would be more documents to pour into the literature on sustainability performance. It may have been due to the increasing environmental crises, climatic variations, contamination and substantial health problems derived from contamination, and the fact that the concept of sustainable development had been widely accepted among the industries⁴. In addition, almost 400 publications were published in each of the last three years. It reflects that this trend will also grow by the rapidly increasing rate, which shows the importance of the topic of sustainability performance.

Figure 2. Number of annual publications in sustainability performance research.

Most influential authors

Table 2 presents the ten most productive authors in sustainability performance from five nations: the United States (4 authors), Canada (3 authors), China (1 author), Norway (1 author), and Qatar (1 author). The first publications ranged between 2009–2015, where five authors were the first authors, three were co-authors, and two were the last authors. Although there isn’t any rule pertaining to author sequence, the first author is often related to the most contribution. Also, the affiliations of authors displayed that sustainability performance studies were mainly conducted in the university.

As shown in Table 2, Haapala, Karl R. can be seen as the most prolific researcher in the field of sustainable performance, having produced the most papers, which is 25. Also, this study checked the hottest research topic of the ten most prolific authors in the last five years. The research of Haapala mainly focuses on sustainable manufacturing issues in recent years. Conversely, only Haapala focuses on sustainable manufacturing areas among the top ten prominent researchers. At the same time, material flow analysis is the most popular research topic among the top ten contributing authors, including Kucukvar, Tatari, Shen and Egilmez. The second most popular research topic is the green supply chain, which was investigated by three authors, involving Searcy, Svensson and Badurdeen. Authors Hewage and Sadiq, with the identical study field of life cycle assessment, co-authored a report entitled “Sustainability assessment of flooring systems in the city of Tehran: An AHP-based life cycle analysis”.

The most productive journal

The literature review should be a valid approach to identify the conceptual content of the research area and guide further studies⁴⁰, whereas identifying the most tightly associated and essential research is pivotal for the bibliography. The top 10 sustainability performance-associated journals are presented in Table 3. As shown in Table 3, the top 10 most prolific journals are owned by five publishers. Four of the top ten journals were published by Elsevier. The most prolific journal was the Journal of Cleaner Production, with 9658 papers covering 299% of the overall publications. The Journal of Cleaner Production has been cited in many papers, which can explain why the CiteScore is remarkably high. As is known to all, the CiteScore can impact authors’ decision-making in selecting journals suiting their original and note-worthy works. Also, after investigation, the Journal of Cleaner Production strongly connects to clean manufacturing, environmental challenges, and sustainable development.

In addition, as shown in Table 3, the top ten journals are nearly all of excellent quality (as they are all SCI or SCIE), such as the social science citation index or science citation index expanded, except for the Sustainability Switzerland. Also, the CiteScore of Sustainability Switzerland is low. But the Sustainability Switzerland is still among the top two most productive journals. That might be because the authors consider the CiteScore and take into account if the journal can deliver research to appropriate readers and facilitate the development of the research area. Sustainability Switzerland is mainly related to sustainability and sustainable development. Therefore, CiteScore ought not to be considered the only measure. Aside from CiteScore, researchers should consider whether the publication can convey research to the appropriate academics and accelerate the relevant research field development.

Country and research institute analysis

Table 4 presents the top 15 most prolific nations facilitating the increase of sustainability performance studies across the globe. Approximately 38% of the international research were from the United States and Australia, revealing that both nations are pivotal for developing sustainability performance studies. The United States was the leading nation with 867 articles, covering 26% of the overall articles across the world. With one-half of the United States’ overall articles, Australia was the second most prolific nation. However, Oregon State University’s total publication (TPi) was comparable to that of the University of Queensland, albeit slightly lower than that of Universiti Teknologi Malaysia. As a result, having the most productive academic institution may not be synonymous with being the most productive country.

Besides, only India (73.2%) had over 2/3 single-country publications (S.C.P.) among the 15 countries. This indicated that India has a more vital intra-country collaboration than other countries. Additionally, China was the nation with the least S.C.P. with 37.0%, in which 101 out of 273 articles were associated with several affiliations from 43 diverse nations. Furthermore, China has more total publications than India, which indicates that international collaboration should be a focus. As shown in Figure 3, outcomes of co-authorship revealed that America was the most affiliated nation, linked to 53 nations/territories. Moreover, the United States produced the most publications, with the total number of publications ranking first. Therefore, international collaboration might contribute to producing more publications. The government needs to formulate flexible and steady policies to sustain transnational collaborations.

Figure 3. A screenshot of a bibliometric map produced on the foundation of co-authorships via net visualization mode.

The URL below can be utilized to open Figure 3 in VOSviewer³⁹: https://bit.ly/3vZdPU7

Co-occurrence (author keywords)

The analyses of the knowledge development track in the study field can assist scholars in comprehensively capturing the development trend of the study field, forecasting the developmental tendency, and offering scholars more research targets. In past research, certain scholars utilized quantitative computation on the foundation of the occurrence frequency or co-occurrence frequency of words or phrases, which delineate the study. As per the association strength between topic words, they clustered them and drew a net of subject topics in diverse periods’ atlases to identify the development path of the study field³⁸.

As shown in Figure 4, there are 7634 author keywords documented, amongst which 6006 (78.7%) were merely utilized once, 782 essential words (10.2%) were utilized twice, and 276 (3.6%) were utilized three times. After re-labelling synonymical single words and congenerical phrases, 420 keywords reached the liminal value of minimal five occurrences for VOSviewer. In the map, the term ‘sustainability’ was the most popular keyword with 878 occurrences and 337 associations with other keywords. In addition, our team discovered the utilization of general terms like “organizational sustainability” (8 occurrences, 12 links), “corporate sustainability” (129 occurrences, 112 links) and ‘triple bottom line’ (22 occurrences, 29 links).

Figure 4. A screen shot of the bibliometric map produced on the foundation of author keywords co-occurrence with overlay visualization mode.

The URL below can be utilized to open Figure 4 in VOSviewer³⁹: https://bit.ly/ 3bsitk4.

The critical concept of sustainable development includes three pivotal components, including society, environment, and economic development⁴¹. In Figure 4, keywords associated with ‘social sustainability, ‘economic sustainability’ and ‘environmental sustainability’ were repeated 31, 69 and 70 times, respectively. This result suggests that the researchers overlooked the social sustainability aspect. Although, some researchers indicated that corporations and commercial activities shouldn’t merely highlight the economy-wise sustainable development. The other aspects should be taken into consideration as well because they are equally essential^42–44.

Keywords that address challenges within sustainability performance by inner or outer factors were discovered as well, e.g., ‘green supply chain’ was reported 21 times and often cooccurred with ‘reverse logistics’. Furthermore, green manufacturing, green purchasing and green packaging, three elements of the green supply chain, were identified as the factor for influencing reverse logistics⁴⁵. But there have been no academics researching the effect of other elements of the green supply chain on reverse logistics, which provided a research gap for future study. On the other hand, material flow analysis is the most popular research topic among the top ten contributing authors. Nevertheless, no streams of keyword occurrence were observed in the review, which linked material flow analysis and sustainable development performance.

Distribution of sustainability performance based on major applications

As per the number of research and author keyword occurrences, positive associations were discovered between the outputs of the subtheme search and the centric theme search. For example, it is shown that the manufacturing industry was the most commonly seen application with 1149 papers in Scopus and 28 occurrences in VOSviewer. This was followed by the construction industry (700 papers and 21 occurrences), food industry (593 papers and 11 occurrences), automotive industry (371 papers and 7 occurrences), agriculture industry (362 papers and 7 occurrences), and oil and gas industry (246 papers and 6 occurrences).

In fact, the manufacturing sector is a cornerstone of economic development, which is pivotal for economy-wise sustainability, and it serves as a major contributor to the Gross Domestic Product (G.D.P.), employment rates and export percentage of countries around the world. However, the rapid development of manufacturing has caused substantial waste, overuse of various resources and overconsumption of energy⁴⁶. Also, achieving sustainability performance helps manufacturing organizations to attain a competitive advantage in the market that is moving towards a greener economy and achieving significant financial gains while attracting customers to assure long term profitability⁴⁷. As a result, an increasing number of academics and practitioners are incorporating sustainability into the manufacturing industry, and the manufacturing industry has become the focus of research.

Furthermore, Figure 5 showed that most publications related to the manufacturing industry, construction industry, food industry, automotive industry and agriculture industry came from the U.S.A. except on the agriculture industry. Australia is the primary focus of research into the agriculture industry’s sustainability performance. The reason for it could be linked to Australia’s economy and culture. The agricultural sector is vital for Australia’s economic and cultural development. In this country, about 65% of overall production is exported, which accounts for about 14% of the overall exportation value in Australia⁴⁸. Also, in general, the U.K. was amongst the top five nations that publish research on all sustainability performance applications. Other nations like China, Australia, Malaysia, India, Netherlands and Italy were listed in diverse applications of sustainability performance and merely once.

Figure 5. Five nations with the most publications on the selected sustainability performance major applications.

Limitations of the study

The outcome may not cover all sustainability performance-associated research on Scopus by restricting the search of “sustainability performance” within titles, abstracts, and content. That’s because certain scholars didn’t refer to their systems as sustainability performance but instead utilized diverse terms. Research in the future should contrast the outputs from several databases like Scopus and Web of Sciences. The search outcomes from Web of Science, for example, automatically demonstrate the most popular research via the ‘hot paper’ function, which remains absent in Scopus. Such a function demonstrates that pivotal research was recognized quickly after publication, which is reflected via a fast and remarkable citation number. Utilizing bibliometric analyses via several data sources will facilitate more systematic research.

Underlying data

Dryad: An Exploration of Trends and Future Directions in Sustainability Performance. https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.8kprr4xqx⁴⁹.

This project contains the following underlying data: