Sustainable Development

Sust. Dev. 2017

Published online in Wiley Online Library
(wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/sd.1671

Understanding the Evolution of Sustainable

Consumption Research
Yue Liu,1 Ying Qu,1* Zhen Lei1 and Han Jia2
1
Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, China
2
College of Communication and Information Science, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL, USA

ABSTRACT
In recent years, the problem triad of population, environment and development has been
joined by the added element of consumption, with a consequent boom in studies on sustain-
able consumption. This study provides a holistic and quantitative overview of these studies,
aiming to track the evolution of research on sustainable consumption, and identify the key
authors and co-authorship network. Using the bibliometric method and network analysis,
this study traces the development of the research themes at hand, and the research network
concerned with them, through the analysis of core literature and journals dated 1995–2014.
The findings highlight that the research on sustainable consumption can be divided into two
periods. These findings clearly illustrate that sustainable consumption has evolved from be-
ing a single practice-oriented research topic into diverse topics studied in a systematized
manner, involving the key factors of sustainability, consumption behavior, energy utilization
and environmental impact. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment

Received 26 November 2015; revised 31 May 2016; accepted 19 September 2016

Keywords: sustainable consumption; consumption behavior; bibliometrics; network analysis

Introduction
Since the term ‘sustainable consumption’ was formally introduced by the Oslo Symposium in 1994, it has attracted
growing academic and media attention. The importance of sustainable consumption is considered to have had a
great impact on modern societies. To date, sustainable consumption has been analyzed from various perspectives.
In 1994, the United National Environment Programme (UNEP) first posed the definition of sustainable consump-
tion, as ‘the use of services and related products which respond to basic needs and bring a better quality of life, while
minimizing the use of natural resources and toxic materials as well as emissions of waste and pollutants over the life
cycle of the service or product so as not to jeopardize the needs of future generations.’ Since the late 1990s, the
environmentally friendly and unfriendly behaviors of citizen-consumers, changing the view of consumption and
creating new consumption patterns, have been a common concern. Heiskanen and Pantzar (1997) analyzed the
evolution of consumption under the guidance of evolution theory and from the perspective of consumers’ social

*Correspondence to: Ying Qu, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, China.

E-mail: quying@dlut.edu.cn

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 Y. Liu et al.

role, which laid the foundation for a changed understanding of consumption patterns. Following this, and in order
to facilitate a change in consumption patterns towards more sustainability, there has been increasing research
conducted into related insights and policies (Onuma, 1999; Thoøgersen, 1999).
Alongside this gradual emergence of the field in the 21st century, the study of sustainable consumption began to
boom in terms of the diversity of both its research topics and its research methods. Topics on sustainable
consumption have varied greatly, ranging from the environmental policy perspective to interdisciplinary and
multi-industry collaborations undertaken in order to catalyze the transition to post-fossil-carbon societies. To date,
most studies in this field have investigated the key influencing factors of sustainable consumption, especially with
regard to the influence of individual consumers’ choice and behavior on environmental quality (Liu et al., 2012;
Şener and Hazer, 2008; Wang et al., 2014; Young et al., 2010). At the same time, different methods and models
have been applied to undertake these studies. For example, life cycle assessment (LCA) is widely used to measure
the environmental impacts of product systems or services (Hertwich, 2005).
Given its existence as a concrete field of study for almost two decades, sustainable consumption research has
gradually developed into a more systematic and diverse field. In particular, attention has been focused on
sustainable consumption theory building and the issue of local versus worldwide applicability in different contexts.
However, to the best of our knowledge, hardly any of the studies to date have adopted a quantitative approach to
systematically review the development of sustainable consumption research, understand the evolution of the
research topics or identify the co-authorship network at the macro analysis. In light of this gap, the current study
provides a holistic, quantitative overview of sustainable consumption, tracing its evolution over the period
1995–2014. Applying the bibliometric method, this study analyses the research trends and popular past, present
and future issues in detail. This paper also identifies the core literature, key journals, and key authors and their
co-authorship networks in studying sustainable consumption. These findings not only are intended to provide a
better understanding of global hotspots in sustainable consumption research, but also may influence scholars’
future research directions.
The remainder of the paper is structured as follows. The methods and data collection are summarized in the next
section. The third section presents and interprets the results of the citation analysis of core literature and journals,
the co-occurrence analysis of keywords, and co-authorship networks. To conclude, the fourth section discusses the
results with an emphasis on past, present and future sustainable consumption research themes and directions.

Methods and Data

Bibliometric Methodology
The bibliometric methodology is a set of methods used quantitatively to analyze a set of literature in a given field.
Conventional bibliometric methods include citation analysis, co-occurrence analysis and co-authorship analysis.
Citation analysis is widely used to evaluate the impact of publications and studies. A citation is a reference to a
book, article, web page or other published item. It implies a relationship between citing and cited works in a
particular research area. The more frequently an article is cited, the greater the impact it is deemed to have
(Garfield and Merton, 1979). Thus, citation analysis is usually applied to identify core literature, journals,
authors, institutions and so on in a given topic area. In this study, core literature and journals were obtained using
citation analysis.
Co-occurrence analysis is applied to point out how keywords are related within a body of literature and how
strong these relationships are (Pilkington and Meredith, 2009). The method is defined as ‘showing the frequency
that two words are cited together in the same article’ (Kessler, 1963). The core themes of a research field can be
identified through analyzing the links between these keywords, mapping out these links and subsequently
establishing the importance and proximity of the topics at hand (Chai and Xiao, 2012). Within a research field that
is still developing, the co-occurrence pattern may be affected by changes in the themes, interests and researchers.
Thus, this study analyzed keyword co-occurrence to understand the evolution of the sustainable consumption
research topic, itself still in development.

Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment Sust. Dev. 2017
DOI: 10.1002/sd
– A Bibliometric and Network Analysis (1995–2014)

Co-authorship analysis is widely undertaken to discover the academic collaboration and schools of thought
present between different countries and institutes. Compared with citation and co-occurrence networks,
understanding collaboration can reveal the strong social bond between researchers who share similar interests
and know each other (Liu et al., 2005). With this in mind, the current study employed co-authorship analysis to
highlight the research groups and international collaborations involved in the field of sustainable consumption.

Network Analysis
Network analysis measures and describes the relationships between interactional units (Parkhe et al., 2006). It
characterizes networked structures in terms of nodes (individual actors, people or things within the network) and
the ties or edges (relationships or interactions) that connect them. These networks are often visualized through
socio-diagrams with nodes represented as points and ties represented as lines. In this study, we established a node
network representing particular keywords and authors. In order to evaluate the importance and influence of a node,
we measured its degree of centrality in the network. Degree centrality is defined as the number of direct links that a
node has, and indicates the importance of a node in the network (Zhang and Horvath, 2005). The larger the degree
of centrality is, the more important the node is. Thus, by calculating the degree of centrality, the importance of
individual keywords and authors can be determined.

Data Acquisition
The literature for this study was obtained from Scopus. Compared with literature that can be sourced via Web of
Science and Google Scholar, the literature from Scopus is arguably more comprehensive and standardized for
bibliometric analysis. The literature was obtained by searching the keyword ‘sustainable consumption’ in the ‘article
titles, abstracts, or keywords’ field, within the set period from 1995 to 2014. The exported information included
article metadata, author data, keywords, references and citations. In order to reduce the amount of duplicated
exported information, it was necessary to undertake post-processing of the analysis. For example, different authors
have different writing habits. This means that the same keywords may be expressed in a variety of ways, such as
‘energy utilization’ versus ‘energy use’, and ‘life cycle assessment’ versus ‘life cycle analysis’. In order to prevent
these ambiguities, this study standardized the different forms of these keywords to a single form using the ‘cluster
and edit’ feature of Google Refine. The feature applies numerous fuzzy-string matching algorithms to identify
clusters of keywords and allow for a standard form to be chosen. The same method of post-processing was then
applied to author names.

Research Tools
This study used BibExcel to conduct a bibliometric analysis, and Gephi to visualize the data network.
BibExcel is designed to assist a user in analyzing bibliographic data, or any data of a textual nature formatted in a
similar manner (Persson, 2010). By making pairs of the selected items, such as frequently cited literature and
authors, BibExcel enables the construction of co-occurrence and co-authorship analyses. The software was designed
by Olle Persson, who specialized in the field of bibliometric studies and has played a leading role in the development
of bibliometric research techniques. Numerous scholars from a diverse range of fields have adopted this software in
undertaking bibliometric analyses.
Gephi is an open-source software for network analysis. The network for this study included nodes and links.
The size of the nodes indicated the degree of centrality, meaning that the larger nodes represented keywords that
were more frequently cited. The width of the links illustrated the strength of the connection between the cited
keywords: the thicker a link, the more frequently the two keywords tend to be cited together. Many studies have
used this software to visualize aggregated journal citation structures and handle files of a substantial size
(Leydesdorff and Rafols, 2012).
This study applied these two software programs to analyze keyword co-occurrence and authorship networks.
A tag cloud was also employed to visualize the importance of certain keywords (Halvey and Keane, 2007), whereby
the larger the font size of a tag, the more frequently the keyword was found to appear.

Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment Sust. Dev. 2017
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 Y. Liu et al.

Results and Analysis

The search result showed that 920 publications were obtained. The types of publication included articles,
conference papers, reviews and others (e.g. book chapters, editorials, notes and short surveys). There were a total
of 630 articles, which accounted for 68.5% of all the sources, followed by 98 conference papers (10.7%), 68 reviews
(7.4%) and 124 other types of information (13.4%). In order to refine the research topic, this paper selected articles as
the type of publication for further analysis. As shown in Figure 1, the number of articles increased slowly in the first
10 years and then rose dramatically in the period 2006–2014. However, comparing this growth rate with those of
articles in other fields, the literature growth rate in the field of sustainable consumption is not outstanding, as
illustrated in Figure 2. For example, compared with the fields of environmental impact, consumption
behavior and sustainable development, the growth rate of articles in the field of sustainable consumption
fluctuated significantly in the period 1996–2007, beginning to level off after 2007. From an overall view, the
average growth rate of articles in the field of sustainable consumption is the highest. Although sustainable
consumption is only one of the key concepts and research fields within sustainable development, the topical recent
developments in sustainable consumption still make it a significant undertaking to identify new directions and
synergy in worldwide research in the field. In 2012, the United Nations adopted the Ten-Year Framework of
Programmes on Sustainable Consumption and Production (SCP), in order to integrate global policies and actions
on SCP. Worldwide, many academics, civil society organizations and business groups are increasingly getting
involved in activities aiming to enhance the sustainability of production and consumption, particularly in Europe
and the United States.

Journal Performance and Core Journals Found

From the perspective of discipline classification, the 630 articles covered a total of 23 discipline categories. The top
five disciplines (those found to contain over 100 articles in the given field) were found to be environmental science,

Figure 1. The total number of articles from 1995 to 2014 [Colour figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]

Figure 2. The growth rate in the number of related field articles from 1996 to 2014 [Colour figure can be viewed at
wileyonlinelibrary.com]

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– A Bibliometric and Network Analysis (1995–2014)

social science, economics and finance, business management and accounting, and energy. Among these,
environmental science has been in a leading position in the last two decades. From the perspective of publication
distribution, the top 10 journals accounted for 33.33% of the total publications. This indicated the breadth of
publication distribution as well as the broad interest in sustainable consumption research from various
perspectives.
When considering the number of articles on sustainable consumption found in particular journals during the
period of 1995–2014, and the impact level of these journals, this study identified and selected the following core
journals in the field of sustainable consumption: Journal of Cleaner Production (total of 61 articles found, IF2013
3.590), Journal of Industrial Ecology (total of 20 articles found, IF2013 2.713), Ecological Economics (total of 29 articles
found, IF2013 2.517), International Journal of Consumer Studies (total of 20 articles found, IF2013 0.718), Journal of
Consumer Policy (total of 19 articles found). The total number of relevant articles sourced in those core journals
was 149, accounting for 23.65% of the total number of articles (see Figure 3). Overall, there appears to be an
increasing trend in the number of articles. However, the total number of articles from 1995 to 2004 was small,
with no papers on sustainable consumption published in 1995, 1996, 1998, 1999 or 2001. This indicates that
research about sustainable consumption was not as popular or concentrated in these time periods. Since the year
2006, the total number of articles published each year in the field has greatly increased. More and more profes-
sional and authoritative articles have been published in the core journals identified, especially in the Journal of
Industrial Ecology and Journal of Cleaner Production. A particular rise in the number of articles in the Journal of
Industrial Ecology appeared in 2010 because the journal then published a special issue on sustainable consumption
and production. Similarly, an increase in the number of articles in the Journal of Cleaner Production appeared in
2013 and 2014, again because this journal published the special issues ‘Sustainable consumption and production
for Asia: sustainability through green design and practice’ in 2013 and ‘Sustainable production, consumption and
livelihoods: global and regional research perspectives’ in 2014. The publication of special issues implies that the
chief editors of these two core journals were paying close attention to the sustainable consumption research and
directed the contributing scholars’ research interests. These increasing trends in the number of articles arguably
also indicate that the academic community’s interest in the field of sustainable consumption has been growing
steadily.

The Core Literature

The number of citations of a particular article can reflect the impact of the literature. The top 15 highest cited ar-
ticles about sustainable consumption were exported from Scopus using citation analysis, based on the criteria that
they were cited over 100 times. These core articles were divided into three categories based on the research con-
tent, as follows: influencing factors or driving forces of sustainable consumption; measuring and evaluating the
levels of sustainable consumption; and other inter-disciplinary research. The predominant research direction
was found to be the influencing factors or driving forces of sustainable consumption. Here, the researchers paid
attention to influencing factors from different perspectives, such as individual consumer behavior, human values,
lifestyle, government policy, urban structure and so on. With regard to consumer behavior in particular, the

Figure 3. Number of articles about sustainable consumption in the core journals from 1995 to 2014 [Colour figure can be viewed at
wileyonlinelibrary.com]

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researchers tended to focus on attitude–behavioral intention patterns and the social practice model. The impact of
involvement, perceived availability, certainty, perceived consumer effectiveness, values and social norms on con-
sumers’ attitudes and intentions towards sustainable food consumption was analyzed beneath the modified
attitude–behavioral pattern model (Vermeir and Verbeke, 2006). In addition, the social practice model focused
on examining the possibilities for designated groups of actors to reduce the overall environmental impacts of their
normal daily routines involving clothing, food, shelter, travel, sport and leisure (Spaargaren, 2003). These articles
all contained findings based on representative, quantitative data with designing a questionnaire.
The second most common research concern was that of measuring and evaluating the levels of sustainable
consumption and then drawing out the relevant policy implications using different methods, such as input–output
analysis, life-cycle analysis, ecological footprint and water footprint. Input–output analyses allowed for the
disaggregation of existing national footprint estimates by economic sector, final demand category, sub-national area
or socio-economic group, whilst ensuring the full comparability of the final results (Wiedmann et al., 2006).
The life-cycle analyses, also primarily based on input–output analysis, tended to be used to inform policy making,
identify which lifestyles are more sustainable and evaluate the effectiveness of sustainable consumption measures
(Hertwich, 2005).
With regard to other inter-disciplinary research, inter-disciplinary studies on sustainable consumption were
found to be booming from the perspectives of industrial ecology, marketing and ecological economics. In the arena
of industrial ecology in particular, sustainable consumption was found to be one of the major research topics, as
highlighted by the International Society for Industrial Ecology (ISIE).
The variable of annual citations was used to track the impact of the core literature. Although miscounting
citations may occasionally occur in using this method, the research hotspots still remain apparent in the data.
The core literature searched was dated to 2014. The annual citation average of the core literature was found to
be 21. The top three articles have different characteristics. The article with the most annual citations was ‘The wa-
ter footprint of humanity’, which was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United
States of America in 2012, and had been cited 64 times per year on average. It ranked second in the total citations
from 1995 to 2014. The study shows how different products and national communities contribute to water
consumption and pollution in different places. It concludes that establishing the links between final products
and consumers can help the latter to take and share responsibilities to reduce their water footprints where most
necessary.
There were two articles jointly ranking second in annual citations, cited by 31 papers per year on average. One
article is ‘Sustainable food consumption: exploring the consumer attitude–behavioral intention gap, which was
published in the Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics in 2006. This article had the highest number of
citations up until 2014, and provided an important innovation to understanding of consumer behavior in
sustainable consumption. The other article is entitled ‘Sustainable consumption: green consumer behavior when
purchasing products’, and was published in the journal Sustainable Development in 2010. This is the only open
access article in the core literature. It contributes to insights on closing the gap between green consumers’ values
and their behavior (Young et al., 2010).

The Evolution of Research Themes in the Two Periods

Over the past two decades, there has been a gradual change in the research themes about sustainable consump-
tion. In order to trace these changes and reveal research hotspots, this paper analyzed keyword co-occurrence
networks. From 1995 to 2014, a total of 630 articles with the corresponding 20 275 references were exported
from Scopus. As shown in Figure 1, the number of articles increased slowly in the first 10 years and then rose
dramatically during 2006–2014. The articles published in the last nine years accounted for 88.2% of the total
number of articles. Moreover, the number of articles about sustainable consumption in the core journals showed
an increasing trend after 2006 (also clearly shown in Figure 3). Considering these changes in the number of
articles and the impact of the core journals, this study divided the evolution of sustainable consumption into
two periods, 1995–2005 and 2006–2014. The first period was found to contain 74 articles, including 2045 ref-
erences, while the second period had 556 articles, with 18 497 references. Following this process, the current
study analyzed and visualized the bibliometric data in three steps. First, by applying Google Refine, a

Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment Sust. Dev. 2017
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– A Bibliometric and Network Analysis (1995–2014)

sophisticated data evaluation and cleanup utility tool, this paper standardized the keyword data exported from
Scopus. Second, the standardized data were imported into BibExcel. With BibExcel, a co-occurrence analysis
can be completed by making pairs of the frequently keywords cited. Third, the resulting BibExcel data were
imported to Gephi, a network analysis program, to visualize the keywords’ networks, layout, degree of centrality,
and clustering.

Research Themes Emerging 1995–2005

This section focuses on the research themes within the sustainable consumption domain that emerged from 1995
to 2005. Figure 4 is a tag cloud, showing the frequency of keywords related to sustainable consumption in this
period. The larger the tag, the more frequently the keywords are cited. As illustrated, the top five keywords were
sustainability, consumption behavior, sustainable development, consumer–resource interaction and environmen-
tal economics. The connections between the research themes were indicated by the co-occurrence shown in
Figure 5. The largest two nodes, i.e. the predominant keywords, were sustainable development and sustainability;
these two were the most important and frequently used with other keywords. The second most important group of
keywords included the nodes of public policy, consumption behavior, social aspects and economics. The node size
of sustainable consumption was relatively small, implying that this keyword was not widely used with other
keywords.
The width of the link between two nodes stands for the strength of their relationship. The thickest link re-
veals that the most topical issues in this time period were sustainability and consumption behavior. The link
of sustainability with consumer–resource interaction was relatively thick, alongside other relatively thick links
of sustainable development, environmental economics, lifestyles and consumer–resource interaction with con-
sumption behavior. These relative links imply that these topics were closely connected with the most topical
issues.
As a whole, the number of nodes was few, the sizes of the nodes were relatively small and the widths of the links
were thin, collectively revealing that the research field was only at an early stage in that period and, as yet, not one
that was systematically being engaged with.

Figure 4. Keyword occurrence related to sustainable consumption in the first period (1995–2005) [Colour figure can be viewed at
wileyonlinelibrary.com]

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DOI: 10.1002/sd
 Y. Liu et al.

Figure 5. Keyword co-occurrence related to sustainable consumption in the first period (1995–2005) [Colour figure can be viewed at
wileyonlinelibrary.com]

Sustainable consumption is an important aspect of sustainable development. In the 1990s, the research on
sustainable consumption was focused on household energy efficiency. From the perspective of metabolism analysis,
the most effective path of achieving sustainable consumption was deemed to be that of reducing the circulation of
material energy in the family system. Up until 1994, the concept of sustainable consumption was formally advanced
by the Oslo Symposium, with relevant research focused on the environmental impacts of different consumption
behaviors. Ursula Hansen analyzed the developed countries’ leading consumption idea of consumer sovereignty
and proposed to create a new model of consumption that could reduce the traditional consumption patterns’
harmful effects on the environment (Hansen and Schrader, 1997). The early research traced from sustainable
development and focused on changing non-sustainable consumption patterns (Gatersleben, 2001; Seyfang, 2004).
Most previous research can roughly be classified as either psychology-based or social-context-based solutions
aiming to affect consumer behaviors. The psychology based solutions emphasized the need to change consumer
attitudes from consumerist to being environmentally friendly, and identified the key influencing factors over

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– A Bibliometric and Network Analysis (1995–2014)

consumer attitude. The study of consumption patterns has largely been the domain of empirical researchers, who in
many cases were theoretically inspired by the models emerging from studies of consumption behaviors
(Spaargaren, 2003). There have been many models introduced from other domains to explain consumption
behaviors, including economic models, social marketing models and psychological models (Wang et al., 2014).
The attitude–behavior model, a widely used psychological model, has applied theories of individual consumer
attitude to predict consumers’ actual future behavior. One of the most influential frameworks from 1995 to 2005
was seen to be the theory of planned behavior. Jackson (2005), who provides a comprehensive review of the
literature on consumer behavior and behavioral change, concludes by presenting different models of change and
recommendations to policy makers in order to encourage a more sustainable lifestyle.
For their part, social-context-based solutions have acknowledged that individual consumption behavior cannot
evade the structural circumstances that surround it. Typical structural factors include the political system, legal
system, business mode and so on. The social-context-based solutions explain how consumer behaviors are affected
by structural social factors, such as working life conditions, urban structure and everyday life patterns, in order to
enable appropriate policies for sustainable consumption to be formulated (Sanne, 2002). Overall, it is evident that
in the period 1995–2005 changing consumer behavior was the most topical issue, whether from the micro
perspective of the individual or the macro social field, with related topics including environmental policy, public
policy and so forth.

Research Themes Emerging 2006–2014

During 2006–2014, the domain of sustainable consumption started to stand out while at the same time becoming
connected with other, more diverse research themes. In this period, there was a boom in sustainable consumption
(see Figure 6). As Figure 6 further shows, apart from sustainable development, sustainability and consumer
behavior, some new themes were also revealed, such as input–output analysis, life cycle analysis, greenhouse gases
(GHGs) and industrial ecology. The current study conducted a co-occurrence analysis, where keywords from the
articles were selected in places where any two keywords about sustainable consumption were used together more
than two times. The co-occurrence network shown in Figure 7 illustrates the key emergent research themes in this
time period. Compared with the first period, the number of the nodes was greater, the sizes of the nodes were larger

Figure 6. Keyword occurrence related to sustainable consumption in the second period (2006–2014) [Colour figure can be viewed
at wileyonlinelibrary.com]

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 Y. Liu et al.

Figure 7. Keyword co-occurrence related to sustainable consumption in the second period (2006–2014) [Colour figure can be
viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]

and the links between nodes were thicker in the second period. Sustainable consumption, sustainable development
and sustainability became the largest nodes, indicating that sustainable consumption started to be widely used with
other keywords in 2006–2014. In order to clearly show the relationship between sustainable consumption and other
topics, this study selected data when any two keywords about sustainable consumption were used together more
than five times. Figure 8 shows that ‘sustainable consumption’ was frequently used together with the terms
environmental impact, consumption behavior, input–output analysis, life cycle analysis, household energy, energy
efficiency and GHGs. Based on these high-frequency keywords, the major issues were divided into two categories in
the second time period, including research content and research methods.
From the perspective of research content, consumer behavior and environmental impact were still the key topical
issues in the second period. Compared with the first period, researchers here tended to explored the consumer
attitude–behavioral intention gap (Vermeir and Verbeke, 2006). This gap refers to the phenomenon of 30% of

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– A Bibliometric and Network Analysis (1995–2014)

Figure 8. Keyword co-occurrence only related to ‘sustainable consumption’ in the second period (2006–2014) [Colour figure can
be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]

consumers reporting that they are very concerned about environmental issues, but struggling to translate this into
purchases (Defra, 2006). In order to eliminate this gap, different researchers have undertaken studies that greatly
expanded the general understanding of the core influencing factors driving sustainable consumption behavior. For
example, Dobson proposed that changes in consumption behavior driven by environmental citizenship towards
sustainable development are more likely to last than behavior driven by financial incentives (Dobson, 2007).
At the same time, some studies tended to understand and predict sustainable consumption at the individual level,
overlooking the social and situational factors influencing consumers’ decision to act sustainably (Steg and Vlek,
2009). For example, the social practice model offered a feasible alternative, because this model focused not on
individual attitudes but rather on the actual behavioral practices (Hargreaves, 2011).

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When considering environmental impact, this tended largely to be directed at the supply side in the past.
Nowadays, the demand side is receiving much more attention, as a means of understanding and achieving
sustainable consumption. Particularly in the developed nations, it has been reported that household consumption
contributes most to GHG emissions (Hertwich, 2005). For example, Nansai et al. (2012) revealed that approximately
61% of Japan’s 2005 carbon footprint was derived from the consumption of Japanese households (Nansai et al., 2012).
Changing household consumption patterns has been widely recognized as an indispensable element for achieving
sustainable consumption; it has been associated with household consumption from the perspectives of different
consumer groups, income levels and geographic areas, in order to measure the impacts accurately. In particular,
environmental impact was seen to be measured in energy use figures and/or mainly in terms of energy-related
GHG emissions. Household energy, energy efficiency and carbon dioxide were the new keywords that emerged in
2006–2014. Household energy consumption played a dominant role in energy consumption, and it contributed to
72% of global GHG emissions (Hertwich and Roux, 2011). The former is usually divided into direct household energy
consumption (e.g. space heating, electricity) and indirect household energy consumption (i.e. energy required for the
production, distribution and disposal of all goods and services delivered to consumers except direct energy
expenditures) (Duarte et al., 2014). In order to devise sustainable consumption patterns, researchers began to pay
greater attention to understanding the empirical links between people’s lifestyles and the associated energy
consumption and carbon emissions (Jackson, 2005). For example, a seminal empirical study was conducted in the
United Kingdom in order to explore how household energy use is related to the socio-economic and demographic
characteristics of households at both the national and local levels (Druckman and Jackson, 2008).
From the perspective of research methods, input–output analysis, carbon footprint, ecological footprint and LCA
were closely connected with sustainable consumption. Input–output analysis was widely applied in this second time
period, and usually combined with other methods. Such analyses allowed for the disaggregation of national
ecological footprints by economic sector, detailed final demand category, and sub-national area or socio-economic
group, in order to help inform scenarios, policies and strategies on sustainable consumption (Wiedmann et al.,
2006). Using these footprint concepts (carbon footprint, ecological footprint), a variety of footprint indicators were
put forward to quantify such consumption-based burdens (Hoekstra and Wiedmann, 2014). In particular,
numerous studies have analyzed the environmental impacts wrought by household consumption, the single largest
category of final demand (Druckman et al., 2012; Duarte et al., 2014). Today, ecological economists have constructed
a ‘footprint family’ in which a suite of footprint-style indicators, such as the ecological, carbon and water footprints,
are combined to measure the environmental impacts associated with multiple human activities (Galli et al., 2012).
They believe that many well-grounded footprint models have the potential to consolidate the scientific foundation of
planetary boundaries by providing a robust and reliable assessment of current environmental impacts. LCA was
proposed to promote sustainable patterns of production and consumption (World Summit on Sustainable
Development (WSSD), 2002). It has been used in the area of sustainable consumption to inform policy making,
select areas of action, identify which lifestyles are more sustainable, advise consumers and evaluate the effectiveness
of sustainable consumption measures (Hertwich, 2005). LCA analysts have also collected data on a wide range of
emissions and resource uses. Methods have been developed to aggregate different pressures to impact indicators,
taking into account environmental mechanisms and human values.

Collaboration Network
Before describing our findings on the collaboration network, it should be noted that the names of particular regions
appeared in the second period (Figure 7), including Europe, Asia, the UK, China, Finland and Australia. They were
directly linked with sustainable consumption, indicating that an abundance of case studies has been conducted in
these regions. Accordingly, this section first outlines these countries’ performance, various institutions’
performance and finally authors’ performance in the field of sustainable consumption research from 1995 to
2014. The UK, accounting for 22.2% of all articles, was seen to be the most productive country in publishing articles
in this field. The UK was followed by the USA (10.3%), Germany (10.2%), the Netherlands (7.13%) and Australia
(6.48%). Among the top 10 institutions publishing the articles, six were based in the UK and four in Germany,
the Netherlands, Finland and Norway respectively. There were no institutions from the USA or Australia, although
both of them ranked in the top five article-producing countries.

Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment Sust. Dev. 2017
DOI: 10.1002/sd
– A Bibliometric and Network Analysis (1995–2014)

The UK has always held a leading position over the past two decades in the number of articles published and
disseminating institutions. Thus it is perhaps no surprise that the most productive author, Gill Seyfang, is from
the UK. To date, she has published 22 articles in this field, with an h-index of 20. The h-index takes both the
quantity (number of articles) and quality (number of citations) of the author into account at the same time (Vieira
and Gomes, 2011). The top five productive authors’ average h-index was found to be 21.8. While a higher h-index

Figure 9. Network of co-authorship and countries of authors’ affiliations (1995–2014) [Colour figure can be viewed at
wileyonlinelibrary.com]

Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment Sust. Dev. 2017
DOI: 10.1002/sd
 Y. Liu et al.

means that the individual has a higher academic influence, this does not mean that they have closer collaboration
relationships with their peers.
The collaboration networks in the current study were established using co-authorship analysis. Figure 9 presents
a scattered network of the sustainable consumption research domain, with nine groups from seven countries. The
size of the nodes indicates whether or not an author frequently co-authors with other researchers. The larger a node
is, the more frequently the author collaborates. The three largest author nodes were found to be those of
Sylvia Lorek, Maurie J. Cohen and Arnold Tukker, from Germany, the USA and the Netherlands respectively.
Their respective h-indices are 8, 12 and 17. Sylvia Lorek has focused on sustainable consumption governance.
Maurie J. Cohen has trialed a multi-dimensional approach to exploring sustainable consumption. Arnold Tukker
has paid attention to the environmental impacts of products and product–service systems. These three authors have
also formed a cooperative cluster, with the one between Maurie and Arnold especially strong. In addition, they
have established a transnational cooperation network between the USA and the Netherlands – a research group that
focuses on consumer behavior and environmental impact.
Another cluster consisted of UK and Australian researchers. Peter Jones and David Hillier were found to have
close cooperation in marketing sustainable consumption in the UK. However, as shown in Figure 9, the number
of nodes representing the UK was few and the sizes of these nodes were small. UK authors published the highest
number of articles, with a corresponding relatively high academic influence. Nevertheless, they were found to be
less good at collaborating with others. Moreover, the groups from Italy, South Korea and China were found to
be relatively independent clusters. In other words, research about sustainable consumption has been conducted
by an international community of scholars spread over Europe, Asia, the USA and Australia, where authors from
different countries have communicated and collaborated in the field.

Conclusions
Over the past two decades, a number of environmental problems threatening the environment and human life have
been identified. A key cause of these problems is the over-consumption of natural resources, with the industrial na-
tions showing the highest per capita consumption. Unsustainable consumption is a major cause of global environ-
mental problems such as global warming, air and water pollution, and the reduction of biodiversity. With the
recognition of the importance and availability of sustainability strategies for consumption, the amount of literature
has grown substantially. Research related to sustainable consumption has grown into a multidisciplinary field, in-
cluding studies in environmental science, social science, business management and so forth. It is necessary to eval-
uate the growing amount of literature on sustainable consumption. Accordingly, this study has aimed to track the
evolution of the sustainable consumption research field and trace the development of its key themes from 1995
to 2014. Based on data drawn from Scopus, characteristics such as publication outputs, discipline categories, journal
performance, core literature, topical issues and collaboration networks were analyzed using bibliometric and net-
work analysis.
The findings of this study revealed that the sustainable consumption field has experienced substantial growth
over the identified time period, with a growing number of publications as well as citations. Compared with related
fields, sustainable consumption was seen to have the leading growth rate. Publications pertaining to sustainable
consumption covered more discipline categories in the second period (2006–2014) than the first period (1995–
2005). These and the other findings that have been discussed collectively indicate that sustainable consumption
is a growing, diversifying and advancing research field.
In terms of journal performance, the analysis of core journals illustrated that the Journal of Cleaner Production,
Ecological Economics and the Journal of Consumer Policy were the core journals engaging with sustainable
consumption in the first period; in particular, the Journal of Cleaner Production retained its leading role in the second
period. Moreover, in the second period, the number of special issues about sustainable consumption in the core
journals grew, indicating that the academic community has steadily been paying more attention to this field.
Integrating the analysis results with the special issues in the core journals, consumer behavior is likely to remain
a topical issue focused on modifying and replacing current paradigms and lifestyles in order to support transitions

Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment Sust. Dev. 2017
DOI: 10.1002/sd
– A Bibliometric and Network Analysis (1995–2014)

to sustainable and equitable societies. Next, focusing on articles, this study identified 15 core articles that were cited
over 100 times. These were divided into three categories based on their research content: influencing factors or
driving forces of sustainable consumption, measuring and evaluating the levels of sustainable consumption, and
other inter-disciplinary research. These category results also showed the main thrust of research interests in
sustainable consumption over the last two decades. Considering the articles’ citations and the annual citations,
the top three cited articles, Hoekstra (2012), Vermeir and Verbeke (2006) and Young et al. (2010), remain essential
reading in the field. Hoekstra’s article introduced a new method for gauging the water footprint, in order to evaluate
the consumption level. Vermeir and Young respectively concentrated on consumer behavior, and on closing the gap
between green consumers’ values and their behavior in terms of sustainable consumption.
Based on the results of the keyword co-occurrence analysis, dividing the overall time frame into two distinct
periods is helpful to elucidate the development of sustainable consumption as a domain, and beneficial to explore
the research themes with greater specificity. Given that the number of articles found for the first period was 75,
accounting for only 11.8% of all articles, it can be concluded that sustainable consumption held only a minority share
of research interest in the first period. Then, sustainable consumption was only loosely connected with the two
major research concerns (sustainable development and sustainability), with the topics being practice oriented and
based on empirical research, namely experience and observation. The research themes were about consumption
behavior, public policy, social factors and economics. This first period focused on changing consumer behavior
based on the attitude–behavior model.
In the second period, the number of articles, citations and discipline-related categories increased markedly.
Accordingly, this study has found that sustainable consumption gradually became widely accepted, with new
research content and approaches enriching the field and stimulating further research. Major issues in sustainable
consumption were analyzed to provide a reference for future research endeavors. Based on the keyword
co-occurrence analysis, consumer behavior and environmental impact emerged as the key themes. In order to
eliminate the attitude–behavioral intention gap, various researchers greatly expanded understandings of the core
influencing factors driving sustainable consumption behavior. This new research content, in terms of environmental
impact, was primarily found to be about household energy consumption, energy efficiency and carbon dioxide. In
particular, environmental impact was measured in energy use figures, and/or with regard to mainly energy-related
GHG emission. The new research approaches included input–output analysis, carbon footprint and ecological
footprint measurement, and life cycle assessment. Using these footprint concepts, a variety of footprint indicators
were put forward to quantify consumption-based burdens. In comparing compared the second period with the first
period, the current study has traced the evolution of sustainable consumption from being primarily practice
oriented and single-interest focused towards becoming more systematized and with diverse topics in the worldwide
research arena. We demonstrated how different researchers and their work have combined theory and practice,
facilitating a wide range of methodologies, policies and educational approaches for further enriching the sustainable
consumption field. At a global scale, our co-authorship analysis highlights the existence of international collaboration
in the field across academic communities, with Germany and the USA holding leading roles in terms of cooperation.
In conclusion, this study provides an overview of the sustainable consumption research domain, tracing the key
past, present and future research themes. The bibliometric analysis conducted has helped to identify the academic
players and community involved, as well as relevant research articles, ultimately helping researchers in the field to
choose their topics and direction.
However, this study also contained some limitations. The Scopus data did not cover all types of source, such as
theses and books. Further work can be conducted to compile more sources and use different bibliometric methods
to compare the results.

Acknowledgements
This work was supported by grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China Project (71473029, 71103024) and a
National Natural Science Foundation of China International (regional) Joint Research Project (71320107006).

Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment Sust. Dev. 2017
DOI: 10.1002/sd
 Y. Liu et al.

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DOI: 10.1002/sd