A comprehensive knowledge pedigree on environmental transparency

Abstract

Environmental transparency issue has drawn increasing concern, and the related research has shown explosive growth. A comprehensive knowledge pedigree of environmental transparency can help understand the spatial and temporal distribution of themes, research categories, cutting-edge research topics and development trends of environmental transparency research, providing research opportunities for the future. Based on the: Social Science Citation Index database in the Web of Science, this article retrieves 930 papers with the theme of “environment transparency” in all years, and analyzes the its knowledge system via the software of CiteSpace. Keywords co-occurrence analysis function is applied to identify keywords and their occurrence frequency in environmental transparency literature, and a keyword co-occurrence network was generated on the basis of high-frequency keywords to explore the knowledge base in the field of environmental transparency research. Then, through co-citation analysis and cluster analysis, the high-frequency co-citation literature and four hot research paradigms of environmental transparency are identified to present the knowledge domain of its research. Next, the paper uses the time zone and strong citation burst analysis to detect the situation where the reference volume changed significantly during a certain period of time, in order to discover the decline or rise of a key keyword in the beginning, development, and cutting-edge period in environmental transparency research field, which contributes to unearth the knowledge evolution path of environmental transparency and reveal how researches related to environmental transparency have evolved over time. Finally, according to the knowledge base, knowledge domain, and knowledge evolution, a visual knowledge graph is constructed to provide a comprehensive review of existing research in the field of environmental transparency.