Analysis of research progress in carbon neutrality based on bibliometrics

Carbon neutrality is an important initiative to address global climate change, and it has extremely important theoretical and practical significance for global climate governance and the building of a community of human destiny. The research on carbon neutrality has been continuously conducted by scholars internationally. Based on the search of SCI-E and SSCI databases in the Web of Science core collection, the carbon neutral literature from 1991 to 2021 was analyzed and mined by using bibliometric methods. The study showed that the number of carbon neutral publications was on the rise, and the research areas were mainly concentrated in the natural sciences, with the top 3 journals in terms of the number of publications being Sustainability, Journal of Cleaner Production and Applied Energy. National Natural Science Foundation of China funded 459 studies in this field, much higher than the relevant institutions in other countries; the backbone of the research was concentrated in the United States and the United Kingdom, whose average citations per article were 51.24 and 43.21, respectively, much higher than those of China (16.91). The current carbon neutral research could be summarized in two major aspects, namely carbon neutral technology and carbon neutral policy, while biomass, hydrogen energy, carbon capture and storage, etc. were the key technologies and research directions for achieving carbon neutrality in the future.