Complete but Fragmented: Research on Energy in Central and Eastern Europe

Abstract

This paper examines 16 years (2004–2019) of research on energy in eleven Central and Eastern European countries. The findings are based on an analysis of 3534 academic articles indexed in the Web of Knowledge database. The paper presents a systematic overview of the authorship, journal of publication, countries covered, and article content. The main conclusion is that the discussion is fragmented, because most of the journals (800 were identified) published only one paper on energy in the region. About one-fourth of the research was published in a handful of major journals. Male researchers dominated our dataset and there has been a visible increase in the average number of authors per article. The country most often covered by the research was Poland and energy efficiency was the most-discussed issue and renewables the most-frequently researched energy source. Surprisingly, nuclear energy and energy security, considered to be the dominant features of the CEE region energy picture, were studied only minimally.