A bibliometric study on “education for sustainability”

Abstract

IntroductionIn the mid twentieth century, Bush (1945) considered the difficulties a researcher faced to find the results that hundreds of researchers had attained. He observed how difficult it was to deal with great quantities of information and the increasingly time it took to keep updated and to produce academic works. Even though the Internet has been offering the tools, which could potentially solve this issue, especially via Web and the Indexation basis of journals, a kind of vicious cycle has been created that impacts the search process. There is an increasingly number of publications, easily created with online systems, to disclose the ever-growing number of scientific researches. Indexation systems like Web of Science and Scopus make millions of articles available to the public. Therefore, we can see that the situation Bush (1945) faced has not changed, once researchers are still dealing with the same difficulties to select the most relevant facts amidst immense bibliographic oceans. Consequently, the bibliometry gained traction as the researchers are trying to understand what is happening in their field of study (Tague-Sutcliffe 1992). AbstractThe scientific production on "education for sustainability" has been growing in recent years what demonstrates the attention this subject has gathered. To better understand and characterize this trend, a bibliometric study of international papers on the subject was developed. The results show that the production has been growing since the middle of the last decade, focusing on the field of the applied social sciences, environmental sciences, energy, management, engineering, humanities and psychology. Australia, United Kingdom, United States, New Zealand, Spain, Israel and Canada are the countries that stand out, and it was possible to characterize the evolution of the production in each of these countries in the last 10 years, as well as to indicate the most used journals, the associated sub-themes, the most cited papers, the most productive authors and their affiliations. This allowed us to understand how the research on "education for sustainability" is being developed, showing its level of maturity and the most frequent themes and journals that have published more papers in the area. It was also possible to identify some themes which present research opportunities. The practical results of this study serve as a guideline for researchers, helping them to explore the available bibliography and the better ways to convey their production.

Education for Sustainable Development: Evolution and Perspectives: A Bibliometric Review of Research, 1992–2018

“…The top 10 research areas covered by documents from the set collection were: education educational research (social sciences), 1132; environmental sciences ecology (life sciences and biomedicine), 614; science technology other topics (technology), 575; engineering (technology), 229; business economics (social sciences), 117; social sciences other topics (social sciences), 65; public administration (social sciences), 50; geography (social sciences), 36; computer science (physical science), 33 and psychology (social sciences), 31. The data were in accordance with those obtained by Côrtes and Rodrigues [4], namely the vast majority of articles came from social sciences, and with those obtained by Veiga Ávila et al [7], the most dynamic areas being those of sciences.…”

“…A decade later, Côrtes and Rodriguez [4] conducted a bibliometric study surveying papers included in the WoS and Scopus databases between 1993 and 2015. Their aim was to offer input by analyzing the literature on Education for Sustainability (EfS) in order to identify future opportunities for research and to show the maturity level of the field.…”

“…Nevertheless, Côrtes and Rodriguez found that these data showed a certain lack of publication specifically about education for sustainability. The majority of articles came from the social sciences, "which have the characteristic of interdisciplinarity of themes and approaches" [4] (p. 14). The authors concluded "that there is a possibility of specific publications or special editions about such themes to emerge" [4] (p. 14).…”

“…In recent years, numerous studies [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10] have shown that the interest in research concerning Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) has grown considerably. As it expands rapidly, this sector is becoming more visible and significant in a global world affected by serious environmental issues and by growing social, economic, and political inequality.…”

Bibliometric Analysis of the International Scientific Production on Environmental Education

“…This interest is reflected in the increase in the production of scientific articles, especially between 2009 and 2014 and between 2017 and 2020. These results are consistent with other studies on Environmental Education (Prosser Bravo & Romo-Medina, 2019), climate literacy (García Vinuesa & Meira Cartea, 2019) or sustainability (Côrtes & Rodrigues, 2016;Hallinger & Chatpinyakoop, 2019).…”