Personal Research Database

Title: Sustainability Science

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: Impact Factor

? Yarime, M., Takeda, Y. and Kajikawa, Y. (2010), Towards institutional analysis of Sustainability Science: A quantitative examination of the patterns of research collaboration. Sustainability Science, 5 (1), 115-125.

Full Text: 2010\Sus Sci5, 115.pdf

Abstract: This paper examines quantitatively the patterns of collaboration over geographical boundaries in the emerging field of sustainability science by empirically analyzing the bibliometric data of scientific articles. The results indicate that an increasing number of countries are engaged in research on sustainability, with the proportion of articles published through international collaboration rising as well. The number of countries engaged in international collaboration on sustainability research has been increasing, and the diversity of countries engaged in research collaboration beyond national borders is also increasing. The geographical patterns of collaboration on sustainability show that research collaboration tends to be conducted between countries which are geographically located closely, suggesting that communication and information exchange might be limited within the regional clusters. The focused fields of research activities on sustainability are significantly different between countries, as each country has its focused fields of research related to sustainability. The specialization of research activities is also observed in international collaboration. While these patterns of international collaboration within regional clusters focusing on specific fields could be effective in promoting the creation, transmission, and sharing of knowledge on sustainability utilizing the already existing regional networks, they could pose a serious obstacle to collecting, exchanging, and integrating diverse types of knowledge, especially when it is necessary to deal with problems involving large-scale complex interactions with long-term implications, such as climate change. It would be of critical importance to establish inter-regional linkages by devising appropriate institutional arrangements for global research collaboration on sustainability science.

Keywords: Bibliometrics, Institutional Analysis, Management, Networks, Research Collaboration, Sustainability Science

? Schoolman, E.D., Guest, J.S., Bush, K.F. and Bell, A.R. (2012), How interdisciplinary is sustainability research? Analyzing the structure of an emerging scientific field. Sustainability Science, 7 (1), 67-80.

Full Text: 2012\Sus Sci7, 67.pdf

Abstract: Sustainability research is expected to incorporate concepts, methods, and data from a diverse array of academic disciplines. We investigate the extent to which sustainability research lives up to this ideal of an interdisciplinary field. Using bibliometric data, we orient our study around the “tripartite model” of sustainability, which suggests that sustainability research should draw from the three “pillars” of the environmental, economic, and social sciences. We ask three questions: (i) is sustainability research truly more interdisciplinary than research generally, (ii) to what extent does research grounded in one pillar draw on research from the other two, and (iii) if certain disciplines or pillars are more interdisciplinary than others, then what explains this variation? Our results indicate that sustainability science, while more interdisciplinary than other scientific fields, falls short of the expectations inherent in the tripartite model. The pillar with the fewest articles published on sustainability-economics-is also the most integrative, while the pillar with the most articles-environmental sciences-draws the least from outside disciplines. But interdisciplinarity comes at a cost: sustainability research in economics and the social sciences is centered around a relatively small number of interdisciplinary journals, which may be becoming less valued over time. These findings suggest that, if sustainability research is to live up to its interdisciplinary ideals, researchers must be provided with greater incentives to draw from fields other than their own.

Keywords: Academia, Bibliometric, Citation Analysis, Citation Analysis, Discipline, Ecological Economics, Economics, Environmental, Falls, Global Environmental-Change, Human Dimensions, Incentives, Indicators, Interdisciplinarity, Journal Maps, Journals, Model, Modern Science, Research, Researchers, Scholarly Networks, Science, Sciences, Social, Social Sciences, Sustainability Science, Sustainable, Vulnerability