Exploring Circular Economy Insights Towards Sustainable Development: A Bibliometric Analysis

The circular economy is one of the most important topics in addressing the world’s environmental problems, aiming to achieve a sustainable future. We are witnessing an increase in awareness of the need to use circularity principles and in the degree of implementation of the circular economy practices by both the business environment and the society in response to the policies practiced by public authorities, mainly in the European Union and China. The need for research on this topic stems from the momentum the concept has gained over the last decade. Using VOSviewer software, our research consists of a bibliometric analysis based on a sample of 9,912 articles published in the last decade, extracted from the Web of Science database. The objective of our analysis is to provide answers regarding the interest in investigating the topic of circular economy in the context of achieving sustainable development. Countries like Italy, China, and England hold the supremacy in terms of the number of papers published and total number of citations, highlighting their important role in research and advancements of the analyzed topic. Researchers from these countries are also heavily engaged in international collaborations with authors from other countries. A few journals dominate regarding the number of publications on this topic and the number of citations of publications, namely the Sustainability journal, the Journal of Cleaner Production, Business Strategy and the Environment journal, and the Resources Conservation and Recycling journal. The research directions in the field can be highlighted through the main themes targeted that, according to our results, are life cycle assessment, recycling, waste management, industry 4.0, environmental sustainability, business models, bioeconomy, innovation, industrial ecology, industrial symbiosis, climate change, and supply chains. We can also highlight the multidisciplinary character of the concept of the circular economy and, consequently, the widespread research directions, with the most papers published in areas like Environmental Sciences Ecology, Science Technology, Engineering, Business Economics and Energy Fuels.