Abstract

Bibliometric analysis is a research method that is used to identify research gaps and the potential paths of empiric exploration of such categories that seemingly have been studied, but which in which enormous scientific and utilitarian capabilities remain undiscovered. Sustainable development is one such category. The purpose of this article is to present the development and evolution of scientific literature on sustainable development, and the research goal is to forecast the developmental directions for this category. Bibliometric analysis was used in the research. Scopus, the international interdisciplinary database, was the data source. Maps of co-occurrence of keywords relating to sustainable development were prepared in VOSviewer ver. 1.6.19. The results of the research provided new and crucial knowledge about the features of contemporary literature on sustainable development, determined following analysis of the content of selected open access journals that are representative for this field. The chronological aspect of research of the concept of sustainable development was also underlined. This, in the context of management development, resulted in essential conclusions and results pointing to the potential directions of development of the analysed area. The results also identify the key publications and journals for the subject being researched. This is one of the few works which features a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of sustainable development (Díaz-López et al., 2021; Nobanee et al., 2021; Yamaguchi et al., 2023; Zhu & Hua, 2017). The added value of the analyses is the information that was prepared in the form of rankings using bibliometric indicators such as the number of citations, number of articles cited, and the map of co-cited journals.

Keywords: sustainable development, climate change, environmental protection, bibliometric analysis, VOSviewer program

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