Matrix Analysis of Structural Convergence Between Sustainability and Policy in Renewable Energy Systems Research

This article analyzes the structural relationship between sustainability relevance and policy relevance in Renewable Energy Systems research. Despite the rapid growth of publication activity, existing studies typically consider the technical, environmental, and policy relevance aspects of renewable energy development separately. The objective of this study is to determine the nature of the relationship between environmentally oriented and policy-relevant research areas within a single publication field. The empirical basis of this study consists of 221,937 publications indexed in the Scopus database for the period from 1976 to 2025. The research methodology includes a descriptive periodization of publication activity and X–Y matrix analysis, where the X-axis reflects policy relevance, and the Y-axis reflects relevance to sustainable development. Matrix analysis of the period from 2013 to 2025 revealed a persistent asymmetry between the two research streams: relevance to sustainable development remained higher throughout the period, while relevance to policy and governance gradually increased, especially after 2018–2019. An additional analysis at the level of individual publications revealed that 3597 papers (1.81% of the publication corpus for 2013–2025) simultaneously belong to both categories. This result indicates a direct but limited intersection between the two research streams at the level of individual documents. All empirical points remain in Zone 2 of the conceptual matrix, which does not allow us to conclude that structural convergence has been achieved. At the same time, the right-hand shift in the matrix points to a gradual strengthening of structural convergence between the sustainability-oriented and policy-and-governance research logics. The main contribution of this paper is to develop a matrix approach for analyzing interdisciplinary research fields and to distinguish between the movement towards structural convergence and limited integration at the level of individual publications. The proposed matrix can be used as a diagnostic tool to assess the structure of research in sustainable energy management and other rapidly developing scientific fields.