Explore the key factors of sustainable development: A bibliometric and visual analysis of technological progress

Technological progress is an important way to realize the coordinated and stable development of economy and environment, and it is also a key factor to promote sustainable development. In the face of a large amount of literature data, traditional qualitative literature analysis methods have certain limitations and cannot objectively show the frontier trends of the research. Therefore, this article uses knowledge graph quantification and bibliometric analysis as research methods to quantitatively analyze technological progress. With the help of CiteSpace bibliometric tool and Web of Science database, this article draws the knowledge map, showing the basic characteristics, evolution logic, and hot frontiers of technological progress in the past 30 years, in order to grasp the new trend of technological progress research. The results show that: the number of studies on technological progress is increasing year by year, and China is the country with the largest number of publications. Research on technological progress mainly focuses on resource labor‐intensive industries on land, while less attention on ocean. The evolution of technological progress is characterized by three stages: theoretical exploration (1997–2005), empirical analysis (2006–2016), and application exploration (2017–2021), and the path analysis and the impact mechanism of technological progress in the field of energy conservation and emission reduction are the focus of scholars at this stage. Finally, this article makes prospects from the aspects of research perspective, theme and content, so as to provide a reference basis for promoting scientific decision‐making of sustainable development.