Ten years of Energy Efficiency: a bibliometric analysis

Energy Efficiency is an international journal dedicated to research topics connected to energy with a focus on end-use efficiency issues. In 2018, the journal celebrates its 10th anniversary. In order to mark it and analyze not only how the journal has been performing over the years, but also which are the trends for academic debate and research in this journal, this article presents a bibliometric overview of the publication and citation structure of the journal during period 2008–2017. The study relies on the Web of Science Core Collection and the Scopus database to collect the bibliographic results. Additionally, the work exploits the visualization of similarities (VOS) viewer software to map graphically the bibliographic material. The research analyses the most cited papers and the most popular keywords. Moreover, the paper studies how the journal connects with other international journals and identifies the most productive authors, institutions, and countries. The results indicate that the journal has rapidly grown over the years, obtained a merited position in the scientific community, with contributions from authors all over the world (with Europe as the most productive region). Moreover, the journal has focused so far mainly on energy efficiency issues in close relationship with policies and incentives, corporate energy efficiency, consumer behavior, and demand-side management programs, with both industrial, building and transport sectors widely involved. Our discussion concludes with suggested future research avenues, in particular towards coordinated efforts from different disciplines (technical, economic, and sociopsychological ones) to address the emerging energy efficiency challenges.