Bibliometric Analysis of Carbon Finance and Carbon Markets: Methodology and Data Sources

1. Research Methodology and Data Sources

1.1 Research Methodology

Early discussions on bibliometrics emerged in the 1950s, with its methodology involving the application of quantitative techniques to bibliometric data (Pritchard 1969; Broadus 1987; Wallin 2005; Donthu et al. 2021). Currently, bibliometrics is widely employed across various disciplines (Ekundayo and Okoh 2018; Wang et al. 2018b). Bibliometric methods serve two primary purposes: performance analysis and scientific mapping (Cobo et al. 2011).

Performance analysis aims to evaluate the research and publishing performance of individuals and institutions, while scientific mapping seeks to uncover the structure and dynamics of scientific fields (Zupic and Cater 2015). Performance analysis enables the examination of contributions to specific fields, such as the performance of authors, institutions, countries, and journals. Scientific mapping can investigate relationships between research components, utilizing techniques like co-citation analysis, bibliographic coupling, co-word analysis, and co-authorship analysis.

Commonly used software for bibliometric analysis includes R Studio, Vosviewer, Citespace, Gephi, BibExcel, and Histcite (Ampah et al. 2021). However, due to limitations in understanding Scopus data, Histcite is not applicable (Fahimnia et al. 2015). BibExcel operates in a complex environment and requires professional knowledge and experience for basic analysis (Ampah et al. 2021). Additionally, Citespace is used to convert Scopus data into WoS format to eliminate data duplication and facilitate better data integration (Ye et al. 2020). Therefore, this study employed Citespace and Vosviewer for bibliometric analysis in the field of carbon finance and carbon markets.

1.2 Data Sources

This study utilized the Web of Science and Scopus databases, which are widely used citation indexes for bibliometrics and systematic literature evaluation. Considering the technical difficulty of merging different databases, researchers often opt to use only one database. A study by Gavel and Iselid (2008) confirmed that there is only a 50% overlap between the Scopus and WoS databases. Therefore, we employed both databases to minimize the exclusion of high-quality relevant articles.

We conducted searches in the Web of Science Core Collection's SSCI and SCI-E and the Scopus database using the search terms 'carbon finan*,' 'carbon market*,' 'carbon trad*,' 'carbon pric*,' 'carbon asset*,' and 'carbon tax*' as title search terms for the field of carbon finance and carbon markets. The search results were imported into Citespace for merging and duplicate removal, resulting in a total of 5,689 articles. The obtained results were then imported into Vosviewer for supplementary analysis. The specific methodology is illustrated in Figure 1.