A bibliometric and visual analysis of environmental behavior research

Abstract

Environmental behavior has become one of the most important research areas in the field of sustainable development in recent years. Based on 818 papers on environmental behavior in the Web of Science database from 2002 to 2020, this paper uses CiteSpace software to analyze the trends in publication, subject categories, influential authors and journals, countries, and institutional collaborations. The results show that environmental behavior research has steadily increased over the past 19 years and has gradually achieved diversity and intersection in research subjects. The research on environmental behavior is mainly distributed in the United States, China, and European countries, with the United States being the largest contributor in the field and at the center of the institutional collaboration network. The present research hotspots are as follows: The concept of environmental behavior, factors affecting environmental behavior, the dimension division of environmental behavior, and the construction of a sustainable environmental behavior model. The sustainable development, predictive environmental behavior indicators, factors that affect environmental behavior, and the construction of theoretical models of environmental behavior will become future research trend.