The energy and environment connection, research trends based on a bibliometric analysis

Energy and environmental topics are tightly linked and cannot be understood without each other especially under the stringent legislation policies and environmental social awareness. Both are considered hot scientific research topics with more than 5 million documents archived on the Web of Science until the year 2019. Based on a vast number of publications, this work proposes a bibliometrics approach to derive scientific connections and to envision future research trends based on semantic analysis and networking landscape representations. The study found that research trends have evolved from a theoretical approach to a more general point of view related to the optimization and integration of renewable energy applications. In particular, the whole energy value chain from harvesting to consumption (including distribution, storage, management and conservation) is the trendiest area of current research and especially its application to the building environment. Those research areas are strongly supported by the recent developments on the internet of things and wireless sensor networks.