Emerging Research Trends in Energy Footprint: A Bibliometric Analysis Using VOSViewer

Although the empirical research in energy footprint have been ballooned in size, bibliometric research of energy of footprint remains limited. Using VOSviewer, we wish to contribute a bibliometric assessment of emerging research trends on energy footprint from 2001 to 2023. Publication characteristics, author keywords, authors collaboration, institutions, and countries were all examined. This analysis also recorded a total of 817 papers from the Web of Science Core Collection database. Study on energy footprint gives significant evidence on the possible linkages between energy and other threatening processes; and assists policy makers to prioritize the feasible departing idea for reducing energy footprint based on the research themes and evolutionary dynamics, hence produces some useful inferences that may be important policy implications. The finding of the bibliometric analysis, containing both the network analysis and the descriptive analysis, as well as focusing on the author keyword, reveal that science, followed by computer science dominate the number of studies in terms of author keyword, keyword cluster and author keyword co-occurrence network. Based on the findings, energy footprint research is expected to increase intensely in the near future. The USA accumulated the most documents and citations over the observed period. Journal of Cleaner Production was the most productive journal while Nature was the most cited journal in energy footprint literature. Owen A had the most publications in this subject area. Machine learning, China, water-energy-food nexus, water footprint, artificial intelligence, internet of things and edge computing have been the topic of previous research. Lastly, the outcomes of this study suggest that future studies of energy footprint could find themselves more innovative by venturing into some aspects of social science such as economic growth and institutional quality, so that the literature on energy footprint could be more diverse and comprehensive.