Ecological Indicators 120 (2021) 106882

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Ecological Indicators
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ecolind

Review

Where has carbon footprint research gone? T

a,⁎ b a
Ru Chen , Ruoyan Zhang , Hongyun Han
a
China Academy for Rural Development, School of Public Affairs, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310058, China
b
China School of Public Policy and Administration, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an 710049, China

ARTICLE INFO ABSTRACT

Keywords: Carbon footprint (CF) stands for a professional term is widely used in the public domain to cope with the threat
Carbon footprint posed by climate change. With obtained 9848 records of literature information from the database of Web of
Research fronts Science, a bibliometric analysis was implemented to judge the knowledge domain structure and evolution of
Intellectual bases frontiers in CF research by using the CiteSpace to make up for the lack of previous reviews. The results showed
CiteSpace
that the CF research was concentrated in the fields of Engineering, Environmental sciences ecology, Science
Normative application
technology other topics, Energy fuels, Computer science and Business economics, and there is a significant
cooperative relationship between researchers, especially those with a high volume of publications. The regional
layout of intercontinental CF research forces was Europe, North America, and Asia, while that between countries
were the United States of America, China, England, Australia and Italy, specifically, the Chinese Academy of
Sciences showed the core force of CF research with a high volume of publications and strong cooperation with
international institutions. The debate and application of CF accounting method, Case Studies of CF for livestock
and its products production, CF estimation for the final consumption of goods and services, Impact of human
food consumption on the climate change, Application of Footprint Family for sustainable development, and CF
estimation for household consumption and its drivers were the emerging CF research fronts in historical evo-
lution. Therefore, the CF research has its own characteristics in terms of spatial and temporal layout, cooperation
intensity and knowledge hierarchy, and the related topics of cross-application of agriculture and energy are
becoming the potential frontier of future research. This work not only provides the possible innovative direc-
tions, but also a reliable reference for the rapid and comprehensive understanding of CF research for the novices.

1. Introduction
Carbon footprint (CF) is generally adopted as an indicator to
quantify carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions (CE) or greenhouse gases
(GHG) emissions (GE) in terms of CO2 equivalents (CO2-eq) (Wiedmann
and Minx, 2008). Although the Global Footprint Network (GFN) in-
dicates it as a synonym for the demand on “CO2 land” or biomass
fixation that is used to offset GE from fossil fuel combustion through
photosynthesis (Galli et al., 2014), the definition closely related to
“Ecological Footprint” has not changed the popular understanding of
CF measured in CE around the public view. However, what exactly is a
“carbon footprint”? Wiedmann and Minx (2008) suggested the scien-
tific definition “a measure of the exclusive total amount of carbon di-
oxide emissions that is directly and indirectly caused by an activity or is
accumulated over the life stages of a product”, and other GHG
(especially methane, CH4 and nitrous oxide, N2O) are usually added to
the measurement range in subsequent research practices (Pathak et al.,
2010; O’Brien et al., 2014; Yan et al., 2015; Cheng et al., 2015;
Rebolledo-Leiva et al., 2017; Bartocci et al., 2019). Judging from the
trend of soaring publications in the past ten years (Fig. 1 below), the
popularity of the CF topic is fully explained. Simultaneously, with the
aims of holding global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius and to
“pursue efforts” to limit it to 1.5 degrees Celsius proposed by the Paris
climate agreement (Rogelj et al., 2016), this hot topic is bound to be
pushed to new heights accompanied by the reduction targets of GE
strengthened.
The prevalence of CF lies in its estimated anthropogenic GE, which
is closely related to the magnitude of climate responsibility on in-
dividuals or organizations, hence accurate accounting of CF is the basic
work to advance research (Wiedmann and Minx, 2008). The “bottom-

Abbreviations: CF, carbon footprint; CO2, carbon dioxide; CO2-eq, carbon dioxide equivalent; CE, CO2 emissions; EIO, environmental input-output; GFN, the Global
Footprint Network; GWP, global warming potential; GHG, greenhouse gases; GE, GHG emissions; LCA, life cycle analysis; MS, mean silhouette; CH4, methane; ME,
CH4 emissions; MQ, modularity Q; N2O, nitrous oxide; NE, N2O emissions; PA, process analysis
⁎
Corresponding author.
E-mail address: ruchen@zju.edu.cn (R. Chen).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolind.2020.106882
Received 16 January 2020; Received in revised form 6 August 2020; Accepted 23 August 2020
1470-160X/ © 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
R. Chen, et al.
Fig. 1. The number of articles published in CF from 2006 to 2020.
up” process analysis (PA) and the “top-down” Environmental Input-
Output (EIO) analysis are universally applicable CF accounting methods
to capture the full life cycle impacts, and a clear definition of system
boundary is essential in both methods for avoiding under-counting as
well as double-counting of CF. However, the truncation error is in-
evitable in PA because it is troubled by how to give an identification of
appropriate system boundaries. Even though the whole economic
system as a boundary has been set by EIO to solve this problem, this
completeness comes at the expense of details. The methodologies to be
improved, nevertheless, have not prevented CF enthusiasts from ap-
plying them to practices with diverse research purposes and availability
of data and resources. The establishment of CF in macro or meso sys-
tems is generally supported by EIO accounting methods, e.g., national
industry sector, multinational enterprises, larger product or service
groups and households (Cai et al., 2019; López et al., 2019; Song et al.,
2019; Nansai et al., 2020), while the advantages of PA-based CF ac-
counting methods are highlighted in the microsystem, e.g., a special
production mode or a specific product manufacturer (Opio et al., 2012;
O’Brien et al., 2014; Bartocci et al., 2019).
A series of economic or policy analysis of climate change that rely
on CF accounting is the embodiment of the profound mystery of CF,
which is a further expansion of its quantification function of GE. For
instance, the effective planning of GE reduction action policies always
come from the function of identifying emission hot spots in product
supply chain by CF, taking food system as an example, meat and dairy
products were the most GHG-intensive types of food (Garnett, 2011),
where key emission sources mainly included intestinal fermentation
and fecal management in its production process (IPCC, 2006; Rotz
et al., 2010; O’Brien et al., 2014), and beef production typically had the
highest global warming potential (GWP) (de Vries and de Boer, 2010;
Notarnicola et al., 2017). Among the crop production systems, rice
cultivation contributed the most to methane emissions (ME) (Pathak
et al., 2010), accounting for 0.69 of the total CFs of flooded paddy rice
in China on average (Cheng et al., 2015), and the utilization of fertilizer
and energy was key emission sources in agricultural production stage
(Pathak et al., 2010; Yan et al., 2015; Cheng et al., 2015). From the
perspective of consumption-based CF, globally, there were over 5.3 Gt
of CO2 embodied in trade among 87 countries for the year 2001 (Peters
2
Ecological Indicators 120 (2021) 106882
and Hertwich, 2008), which had increased to 7.8 Gt CO2 covering 113
countries in 2008 (Peters et al., 2011).
Obviously, CF stands for a professional term was widely used in the
public domain to cope with the threat posed by climate change, which
contributes to building the public’s carbon awareness and national
emission reduction actions (Weidema et al., 2008; Wiedmann and
Minx, 2008; Matthews et al., 2008). However, such luxuriant leaves
always cover the branches of the trees that scholars’ enthusiasm for the
CF application makes it difficult for us to clearly observe the growth
venation of CF research. Unfortunately, previous reviews of CF are
often partial and fragmented, most of which are limited to qualitative
analysis from their own research perspective, and lack of in-depth
discussion on the existing research citation network relationships. As a
result, key documents are often inadvertently missed during the review
process, which may be an important turning point for specific research
directions in the CF field. Such being the case, where has carbon foot-
print research gone? Which specific branches are persistent or tran-
sient? These questions stimulated our curiosity to explore the basic
structure and evolutionary trend of the knowledge domain behind CF
research. Therefore, to obtain a good answer, it is necessary to rely on
the quantitative analysis of the literature, which makes up for the lack
of CF review.
Two fundamental concepts in information science are closely re-
lated to this study: research fronts and intellectual bases. A research
front is defined as an emergent and transient grouping of concepts and
underlying research issues, and an evolving network of scientific pub-
lications cited by it constitutes the intellectual bases, demonstrating its
citation and co-citation footprint in the scientific literature (Chen,
2006). CiteSpace is a bibliometric analysis tool we borrowed and ap-
plied to this study to explore the above information (Chen, 2016), and
more details about the method were described as well as the data col-
lection process in Section 2. The quantity and structure of citing arti-
cles, the distribution of key authors of CF research, and the institutional
and regional distribution of CF research forces were shown in Section 3.
Section 4 discussed how to select and generate the co-citation knowl-
edge map and key literature, and on this basis, we illustrated the re-
search fronts and intellectual bases of current CF, then the potential
frontier in the future research was summarized. Finally, Section 5
R. Chen, et al. Ecological Indicators 120 (2021) 106882

Table 1
The top 15 literature types and research fields in CF retrieval records.
Ranking Literature types Record Proportion (%) Research Fields Record Proportion (%)

1 Article 5989 60.814 Engineering 4426 44.943

2 Meeting 2015 20.461 Environmental sciences ecology 3130 31.783
3 Patent 1080 10.967 Science technology other topics 1686 17.12
4 Review 422 4.285 Energy fuels 1475 14.978
5 Editorial 154 1.564 Computer science 1166 11.84
6 Data set 89 0.904 Business economics 987 10.022
7 Abstract 79 0.802 Chemistry 703 7.139
8 Book 74 0.751 Agriculture 659 6.692
9 News 56 0.569 Materials science 653 6.631
10 Letter 49 0.498 Construction building technology 561 5.697
11 Early access 41 0.416 Instruments instrumentation 560 5.686
12 Data study 18 0.183 Food science technology 466 4.732
13 Thesis dissertation 12 0.122 Telecommunications 441 4.478
14 Other 11 0.112 Transportation 302 3.067
15 Correction 10 0.102 Polymer science 296 3.006

presented the conclusions and limitations of this study.
Our contribution is to use the co-citation analysis function of
CiteSpace to realize progressive knowledge domain visualization of CF
research, then the document clusters and key nodes can be captured in
the co-citation network, and with the generated cluster views and time-
line or zone views, identifying the knowledge domain infrastructure
and the evolution of frontier will become more precise and clear, all of
which have filled in the gap of bibliometric research on CF.
Consequently, this study is not only to clarify systematic knowledge
information such as the current status, development context, knowl-
edge domain structure and key citations of CF research but also to
provide possible innovative directions for future research. Besides, we
also detected some very important authors, literatures, and institutions
in the field of CF research, which should be valued because it helps
novices to quickly enter the field and master the scientific knowledge
base.
2. Materials and methods
2.1. Bibliometric analysis
CiteSpace is a freely available Java application for visualizing and
analyzing trends and patterns in the scientific literature. It is designed
as a tool for progressive knowledge domain visualization (Chen, 2004),
which based on the theory of co-citation analysis and pathfinding
network algorithm to explore the key path of research topic evolution
and turning point of the knowledge domain, and the results of biblio-
metric analysis are presented in a series of visual knowledge maps, in
which the characteristics of time-variant duality between intellectual
base and research front are described in detail (Chen, 2006). Therefore,
by establishing a bibliographic information system on the CF topic, we
can not only clarify the relationship of literature information of CF in
the complex citation network (co-author, co-institution or co-country,
etc.) but also discover the development trend of the knowledge domain
(research progress, research front, intellectual base, etc.) of CF in a
certain period. The operation process of CiteSpace application needs to
be rigorously implemented, prominently, the definition of keywords
and terms, data collection, terms extraction, time zone segmentation,
threshold selection, network simplification and mergence, visualization
knowledge mapping display, visualization knowledge mapping editing
and detection, and the verification of key nodes, etc.
2.2. Data collection
The primary source of input data for CiteSpace is from the Web of
Science (WoS), considering the rich achievements in the research of CF
in recent years, we directly set CF as a professional term, that was, set
the retrieval parameter as Topic (TS) = “carbon footprint”, rather than
TS = (carbon* AND footprint*) to carry out literature information re-
trieval to search for literature that record “carbon footprint” in the Title,
Abstract, Author Keywords and Keywords Plus fields. As a result, we
obtained 9848 records of literature information in preliminary re-
trieval, of which 6799 were from the database of Web of Science Core
Collection, 1066 from Derwent Innovations Index, 1022 from Inspec® and
the rest from BIOSIS Citation Index, Chinese Science Citation DatabaseSM,
Data Citation Index, FSTA® - the food science resource, KCI-Korean Journal
Database, MEDLINE®, Russian Science Citation Index, SciELO Citation
Index, and Zoological Record. To ensure that information from high-core
documents is incorporated into CiteSpace analysis, we first selected the
literature types as Article, Review, and Proceedings paper in the database
of Web of Science Core Collection (WoSCC) to refine the preliminary
retrieval records (with a total of 6597 pieces), besides, we eliminated
the invalid document types such as Book chapter and Retracted pub-
lications, etc., finally obtained a total of 6543 records, of which in-
cluding 4692 articles, 1478 proceedings papers, and 373 reviews.
Furthermore, we used CiteSpace to deduplicate these refined records of
literature information, and 6402 records were retained. All these lit-
erature information records were searched and downloaded on
December 12, 2019, and processed in CiteSpace V.5.5.R2.
3. Results
3.1. Quantity and structure of citing articles
The initial characteristics of the CF document information system
were shown in Fig. 1 and Table 1 by using 9848 preliminary retrieval
records. The term “carbon footprint” in the WoSCC database emerged
in 2006, and the four literature records published were a National
Footprint Accounts (NFA) data set containing CF (Compendium of En-
vironmental Sustainability Indicator Collections), two invention patents
for CE reduction (Patent Number WO2006027623-A1 and
US2006089851-A1), and a journal paper of the CF estimation of student
halls of residence in the University of Strathclyde (Bezyrtzi et al., 2006).
Thereafter, it was shown a rapid growth trend and widely entered our
research horizons, and the number of papers published in 2012 has
been about 200 times that of 2006, then the annual growth rate has
gradually slowed down. As of December 12, 2019, the total number of
literature in 2019 reached 1214 records. The citation frequency of lit-
erature retrieval records showed an exponential upward trend. Since
2006, a total of 64,177 citations (excluding self-citations) have been
cited. The total cited frequency and the average annual cited frequency
were 105,804 and 7053.6, respectively. Moreover, the top 15 literature
types and research fields were listed in Table 1, among which Article,
Meeting, and Patent accounted for a large proportion of the total number

3
R. Chen, et al. Ecological Indicators 120 (2021) 106882

Table 2
The top 10 authors in CF retrieval records.
Ranking Name Record Proportion (%) Institution Country

1 Wood, Richard 34 0.345 University of Sydney or Norwegian University of Science & Technology Australia or Norway
2 Ahmad, Sajjad 31 0.315 University of Nevada Las Vegas United States of America
3 Wiedmann, Thomas 31 0.315 University of Sydney or University of New South Wales Sydney Australia
4 Klemes, Jiri Jaromir 29 0.294 Brno University of Technology Czech Republic
5 Lenzen, Manfred 28 0.284 University of Sydney Australia
6 Tan, Raymond R. 28 0.284 De La Salle University Philippines
7 Hertwich, Edgar G. 27 0.274 Yale University United States of America
8 Kucukvar, Murat 27 0.274 Qatar University Qatar
9 Vazquez-Rowe, Ian 23 0.234 Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru Peru
10 Heinonen, Jukka 22 0.223 University of Iceland Iceland

Notes: We've eliminated 166 anonymous author records, as well as some false rankings, e.g., the author whose name is abbreviated to Li Y, although the number of
retrieval records is 26, it contains many different authors such as Li Yan, Li Yu, and Li Yang etc.

of records, and the research fields of Engineering, Environmental sciences
ecology, Science technology other topics, Energy fuels, Computer science,
and Business economics accounted more than 10% of the records, re-
spectively. It should be noted that the total number of document re-
cords has exceeded 9848 in Table 1 because the same document has the
identity of double literature types or research fields, that's why data
deduplication is essential.
3.2. Distribution of key authors of CF research
The top 10 scholars who published articles in CF retrieval literature,
and their institutions and countries were listed in Table 2. Professor
Wood, from the University of Sydney or Norwegian University of Sci-
ence & Technology, who has long been devoted to the study of sus-
tainability assessment and energy and environment, ranked the first
with 34 literature retrieval records, and the paper “Input-output ana-
lysis and carbon footprinting: an overview of applications” published by
his team in 2009 showed the representative influence in CF research
field with cited 244 times in the WoS database. Professor Ahmad who
comes from the University of Nevada Las Vegas ranked the second and
has a distinctive insight into water resources systems and management,
the synthesis of system dynamics tools proposed by him is not only
effective for the holistic conceptualization of water resources problems
but also provides an innovative reference for CF research. Tied for
second is associate professor Wiedmann, who is good at sustainability
research and from the University of Sydney or University of New South
Wales Sydney, he has explored the apparent discrepancy between
public and academic use of the term “carbon footprint” in 2008, and
suggested a scientific definition based on commonly accepted ac-
counting principles and modeling approaches, especially in 2010, the
term “footprint family” was provided for the first time by his team as a
suite of indicators to track human pressure on the planet and under
different angles, which brought the high interest for both policymakers
and researchers in the field of ecological indicators. The remaining
authors’ information in Table 2 is available in the WoS database.
In order to clarify the social network relationship of scholars in the
retrieval records, we used 6402 refined data and CiteSpace to make the
visualization mapping of the author's cooperation (Figs. S1 and S2) and
obtained the cooperative relationship of scholars and the information of
key authors in the social network (Table 3), obviously, there is a certain
degree of cooperation between the authors (Section A-F in Fig. S1). The
top 10 authors in CF retrieval records (Table 2) have a high-frequency
cooperative relationship with other authors in the cooperative network,
among which 7 authors have more than 20 times of cooperation, and
the Section A account the largest scale of cooperation network. It
should be noted that although some authors have a low frequency of
cooperation, they are indispensable in the cooperation network. Take
section A as an example (Fig. S2), we found some key authors A (a) ~ A
(g), who are the key nodes connecting different subnetworks, and the
cooperation network will be divided and become scattered once the key
authors disappear.
3.3. Institutional and regional distribution of CF research forces
As shown in Table 4, we put both the top 15 institution and country
in 9848 CF retrieval records and that in cooperation network (processed
by 6402 refined data and CiteSpace) into one table, using these two
indicators to comprehensively compare the layout of the CF research
strength. Although the institution with the largest number of published
literature in the retrieval records is the University of California System,
which accounted for 1.503% of the total number of records, it has not
cooperated with other institutions so much that its two sub-campuses
(the University of California Berkeley and the University of California
Davis) ranked 14th and 15th in the cooperation network. Similarly,
Norwegian University of Science and Technology ranked third in the CF
retrieval records but ranked ninth in the cooperation network, and the
State University System of Florida and Indian Institute of Technology
System, which ranked fourth and fifth in publication records, even
failed to enter the top 15 in the cooperation network, indicating that
these institution’s CF research were highly independent. The Chinese
Academy of Sciences ranked second with 115 publications, accounting
for 1.168% of the total number of CF retrieval records. Different from
other institutions mentioned above, it not only has a high volume of
publications, but also has strong cooperation with international in-
stitutions, and its cooperation frequency exceeds 34 that of University
of Sydney in the second place, which showed that the Chinese Academy
of Sciences represents the core force of CF research. Furthermore, al-
though the University of Sydney, University of Leeds, Tsinghua Uni-
versity and the National University of Singapore ranked second, third,
fourth and fifth, the literature publication was not so abundant that
ranked eighth, tenth, 13th and 14th in the retrieval records respec-
tively.
Compared with the institutional layout, the United States of
America, China, England, Australia, and Italy ranked in the top 5 both
in terms of the number of publications and the degree of international
cooperation, which showed the clarity and stability of the regional
layout of the CF research forces. Eight of the top 15 countries were from
Europe, three from Asia, two from North America, one from South
America and one from Oceania. Among them, the number of literature
published in five continents was 2771 (Europe), 2114 (North America),
1821 (Asia), 496 (Oceania) and 147 (South America), and the co-
operation frequency was 2456 (Europe), 1703 (North America), 1313
(Asia), 436 (Oceania) and 134 (South America), respectively.
Therefore, Europe, North America, and Asia were the three main lay-
outs of the CF research force.

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R. Chen, et al. Ecological Indicators 120 (2021) 106882

Table 3
Key authors in the author cooperation network.
Name Cooperation frequency Year of initial Institution and Country Section
cooperation

Wood, Richard 28 2010 Consistent with Table 2 A in Fig. S1

Wiedmann, Thomas 27 2010 Consistent with Table 2 A in Fig. S1
Ahmad, Sajjad 27 2012 Consistent with Table 2 B in Fig. S1
Tan, Raymond R. 25 2009 Consistent with Table 2 A in Fig. S1
Hertwich, Edgar G. 25 2009 Consistent with Table 2 A in Fig. S1
Kucukvar, Murat 23 2014 Consistent with Table 2 C in Fig. S1
Lenzen, Manfred 22 2009 Consistent with Table 2 A in Fig. S1
Klemes, Jiri Jaromir 19 2010 Consistent with Table 2 A in Fig. S1
Vazquez-Rowe, Ian 19 2013 Consistent with Table 2 D in Fig. S1
Heinonen, Jukka 18 2011 Consistent with Table 2 A in Fig. S1
Tatari, Omer 15 2013 University of Central Florida, USA C in Fig. S1
Feijoo, Gumersindo 13 2010 University of Santiago De Compostela, Spain D in Fig. S1
Carvalho, Monica 12 2018 Universidade Federal da Paraiba, Brazil E in Fig. S1
Egilmez, Gokhan 12 2014 University of New Haven, USA C in Fig. S1
Ingram, Dewayne L. 12 2012 University of Kentucky, USA F in Fig. S1
Hermansen, John E. 3 2014 Aarhus University, Denmark A (a) in Fig. S2
Cederberg, Christel 7 2011 Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden A (b) in Fig. S2
Long, Yin 4 2018 University of Tokyo, Japan A (c) in Fig. S2
Ridoutt, Bradley G. 3 2018 Commonwealth Scientific & Industrial Research Organization, Australia or A (d) in Fig. S2
University of the Free State, South Africa
Yu, Yajuan 4 2017 Beijing Institute of Technology, China A (e) in Fig. S2
Xu, Ming 4 2016 University of Michigan, USA A (f) in Fig. S2
Wang, Yixuan 2 2017 North Carolina State University, USA A (g) in Fig. S2

4. Discussion (Fig. S9 drawn with spotlight function of CiteSpace), which played a

4.1. Selection of co-citation knowledge map and key literature
The accurate capture of key nodes and citation cluster depends on
whether the knowledge map drawn by CiteSpace is scientific and aes-
thetic, and two indexes are given according to the network structure
and the sharpness of cluster: Modularity Q (MQ) and Mean Silhouette
(MS), which lay a foundation for us to evaluate the effect of knowledge
mapping. Generally, when the MQ value is greater than 0.3, it means
that the knowledge structure is significant, and when the MS value is
greater than 0.5, the cluster view is considered reasonable (Chen,
2016), hence the scientific and aesthetic knowledge map needs to be
drawn multiple times with different thresholds until the MQ and MS
values reach the ideal level. However, the importance and rationality of
MQ and MS values are always ignored in previous research (Fang et al.,
2018; He et al., 2019; Yang and Meng, 2019), which makes us have to
question the reliability of their research conclusions. This phenomenon
reflects the popularity of bibliometric methods, but on the other side of
the shield, it is enough to draw attention to the normative application of
methods.
Based on the above considerations, we adopted different selection
criteria (the debug parameters are listed in Table 5), combined the MQ
and MS values, and repeatedly drew the knowledge map with 6402
refined data in the CiteSpace software. Three data filtering strategies
were debugged (TOP N per slice, TOP N% per slice, Threshold inter-
polation) in the software. In Scheme 1 (S1), we first keep all the lit-
erature information records by setting “TOP N% = 100” to obtain the
Fig. S3, and the highlighted colors in the figure indicated the popularity
of CF research in recent years. Besides, removing redundant literature
information was essential because the excessive data volume makes the
map too complicated to find key literature, then multiple strategies for
three data filtering methods were debugged in Schemes 2–5 (Figs.
S4–7). Only Schemes 6 and 7 (Table 5) were selected as the ideal maps
with MQ and MS values after repeated tests (Fig. S8 and Fig. 2), and we
chose a higher value map (Fig. 2) for co-citation analysis.
As shown in Fig. 2, the key literature nodes were marked with
purple circles (more details about node size, color and thickness within
nodes, thickness and color of the links between nodes can be accessed
from Chen, 2016) and appear at the turning point of the critical path
creative role in the evolution of the CF knowledge domain. Moreover,
although some high-frequency citations were not marked with purple
circles, they have accelerated the growth and expansion of the knowl-
edge domain, and we collected literature information on both of them
in Tables S1 and S2. Meanwhile, we used the cluster generation and
labeling functions provided by CiteSpace to perform clustering on the
data in Scheme 7, and the clustered label words were extracted by log-
likelihood rate algorithm, then the CF knowledge domain was divided
into 13 knowledge communities in Fig. 3. Furthermore, in order to
delineate the historical span of clusters and their relationships, a time-
line view was drawn by using CiteSpace (Fig. 4).
4.2. Fronts exploration of CF research
The relevance and historical evolution of the intellectual bases de-
termine that of research fronts because of a time-variant duality be-
tween them, therefore, the basic structure and evolutionary trend of the
knowledge domain behind CF research surfaced through reading 81
representative literature (Tables S1 and S2) hidden in different clusters
(Fig. 3) in detail and combining with the time-line view (Fig. 4). The
parameters of 13 clusters were listed in Table 6, although the knowl-
edge communities sorted by cluster-size, we used the time trend of the
evolution of the knowledge domain (the average year in Table 6) to
integrate different clusters and reveal the historical track of CF re-
search. It is worth noting that the clustered label words were extracted
from citing literature (research fronts, emerging literature from 6402
refined data mentioned above), and the nodes in the cluster represented
the co-cited literature (intellectual bases), which came from the “CR”
field of the citing documents.
4.2.1. First phase of CF research
C0, 1, 4 and 12 were the early clusters in the research field of CF,
which have formed the corresponding intellectual bases of the research
fronts of multi-region input–output model (MRIO), milk product, supply
chain, and global warming potential, respectively. Besides, the first re-
ference of C0 and C4 appeared in 2001 (Fig. 4), and they were closely
linked through two key articles: Lenzen et al. (2000) and Wiedmann
et al. (2007) (Fig. S10). C1 and C12 were closely related to C0 through
ISO (2006) and Weidema et al. (2008), Peters and Hertwich (2008) and

5
R. Chen, et al. Ecological Indicators 120 (2021) 106882

Hertwich and Peters (2009) (Figs. S11 and 12), and the first literature
of them appeared in 2006 and 2007 respectively (Fig. 4). Obviously, C0

Netherlands
Top 15 country in cooperation network

Germany
Australia
with a high core position congealed the other three clusters together in

Malaysia
England
Country

Norway
Sweden
Canada

France
China

Brazil
Spain
the first phase of CF research.

India
Italy
USA In the intellectual base of C0, Wiedmann and Minx (2008) suggested
a scientific definition based on commonly accepted accounting princi-
Cooperation frequency

ples and modeling approaches on CF and found that the input-output

analysis was able to provide comprehensive and robust CF assessments
of production and consumption activities at the meso level than so-
phisticated life cycle analysis (LCA). Besides, due to the question of how
to assign the responsibility of internationally traded GE, the LCA
1370

method traditionally assumes with full consumer responsibility lead to

842
623
436
401
377
351
333
309
220
176
163
162
145
134
double-counting because many producers have calculated their own CF
(Lenzen et al., 2007). Actually, using the consumption-based national
Top 15 country in CF retrieval records

emission inventories was favored by scholars because of the territorial

system boundary used by the United National Framework Convention
Netherlands

of Climate Change has been critiqued for not including international

Germany
Australia

Malaysia
England
Country

Norway
Sweden
Canada

transportation and potentially causing carbon leakage, and the emis-

France
China

Brazil
Spain
India
Italy
USA

sions embodied in the trade may have a significant impact on partici-

pation in and effectiveness of global climate policies such as the Kyoto
Protocol (Peters and Hertwich, 2008). Although which type of the
model is most suitable for CF accounting depends on the research
purpose of the particular application, the MRIO models are particularly
Record

1722
1237

appropriate to estimate the CF of production, consumption, imports and

679
496
443
425
413
400
392
257
216
184
177
161
147

exports (Wiedmann et al., 2007), which reveals why it is widely used in

Norwegian University of Science and Technology

C6 (following discussion).
The interactive relationship between the supply chain and CF has
been discussed by scholars in the C4 intellectual base, focusing on the
advantages and disadvantages of the LCA method. The early CF ac-
University of Santiago De Compostela

counting specifications focused only on direct GE or energy emissions,

Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Technical University of Denmark

University of California Berkeley
National University of Singapore

which led to large underestimates of CE for providing products and

University of California Davis
Chinese Academy of Sciences

services (Matthews et al., 2008; Lee et al., 2011). In contrast, ap-

University of Manchester

proaches based on LCA methods are available to track CF across the

University of Sydney

Tsinghua University

entire supply chain, ensuring that the large sources of environmental

University of Ghent
University of Leeds

Aarhus University
Top 15 institution in cooperation network

Aalto University

effects are not ignored across supply chains of products and services.
However, scientifically drawing system boundaries is difficult and even
Institution

suffer from a truncation error (Suh et al., 2004), which is caused by the
omission of resource requirements or pollutant releases of higher-order
upstream stages of the production process (Lenzen et al., 2000). For this
reason, a hybrid evaluation method combining process analysis with
Cooperation frequency

input-output analysis was proposed as an effective solution (Lenzen

The top 15 institution and country in CF retrieval records and cooperation network.

et al., 2000; Suh et al., 2004), which has been proven to be widely used
in C11 (the following discussion).
Case Studies of CF in milk production based on PA constituted the
intellectual base of C1. The rapidly increasing demand for animal
92
58
48
46
44
44
42
41
41
40
40
39
39
37
37

protein brought growth within the livestock sector, which has con-
tributed significantly to environmental problems such as ecosystem
Norwegian University of Science and Technology

pollution, global warming by GHG emission and biodiversity loss (Opio

et al., 2012). Flysjö et al. (2011) analyzed the 1 kg of energy corrected
United States Department of Energy Doe
University of New South Wales Sydney

milk CF at the farm gate for an outdoor pasture grazing system in New
Indian Institute of Technology System

University of Santiago De Compostela

Zealand was 1 kg CO2-eq and a mainly indoor housing system with

State University System of Florida

Technical University of Denmark

Wageningen University Research

National University of Singapore

pronounced use of concentrate feed in Sweden (SE) was 1.16 kg CO2-eq

Top 15 institution in CF retrieval records

University of California System

Chinese Academy of Sciences

based on the LCA methods. Took a similar approach, Kristensen et al.

University of Manchester

(2011) estimated per kg energy corrected milk CF in the organic system

University of Sydney

of 32 organic dairy farms was 1.27 CO2-eq, higher than 35 conventional

Tsinghua University
University of Leeds

dairy farms (1.20 CO2-eq) before allocation into milk and meat. Milk
production CF in organic farms showed better environmental perfor-
Institution

mance than for conventional farms (Thomassen et al., 2008).

There has been a growing interest in understanding GWP at a
variety of scales in C12, covering for example, individuals, households,
companies, and even entire nations (Peters, 2010). CF benefit humans
Record

by providing goods and services, as it is discussed in C0, consumers

148
115
93
78
77
68
67
63
56
52
50
48
48
47
46

should be the responsibility for emissions. In addition to milk products

mentioned in C1, CF for other goods and services had also been studied
Ranking
Table 4

at different scales, e.g., Hertwich and Peters (2009) used MRIO model
10
11
12
13
14
15
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9

to estimate CF of the final consumption of goods and services with 8

6
R. Chen, et al. Ecological Indicators 120 (2021) 106882

Table 5
Parameter settings of the three data filtering strategies in S1-7.
Selection criteria Time slicing Pruning Nodes Links Density MQ MS

TOP N% = 100 (S1) 2006–2019 Years per slice (1) None 9807 44,898 0.0009 0.8582 0.1607
TOP N% = 10 (S2) 2006–2019 Years per slice (1) None 1546 7673 0.0064 0.7579 0.1877
TOP N = 100 (S3) 2006–2019 Years per slice (1) None 821 4024 0.012 0.7169 0.2163
TOP N = 50 (S4) 2006–2019 Years per slice (1) None 334 1747 0.0314 0.6155 0.2528
Thresholding (2, 2, 20; 4, 3, 20; 4, 3, 20) (S5) 2006–2019 Years per slice (1) None 1647 8521 0.0063 0.7576 0.1619
TOP N = 20 (S6) 2006–2019 Years per slice (1) Pathfinder (pruning the merged network) 156 241 0.0199 0.7765 0.5345
Thresholding (2, 1, 20; 9, 9, 20; 10, 10, 20) (S7) 2006–2019 Years per slice (1) Pathfinder (pruning the merged network) 191 203 0.0112 0.8572 0.5721

Notes: Explanation of the meaning of all parameters can be obtained in Chen (2016).

categories (construction, shelter, food, clothing, mobility, manu-
factured products, services, and trade) for 73 nations and 14 aggregate
world regions, where food accounted for 20% of GE. Hillier et al.
(2009) estimated the CF of different crops (e.g. legumes, winter and
spring cereals, oilseed rape, potato) on conventional, integrated and
organic farms with the farm survey data from the east of Scotland, 75%
of the total emissions came from nitrogen fertilizer application. More-
over, the urgency of food product CF linking climate change and food
security was highlighted in extensive case studies implemented by
scholars in C3 (following discussion).
4.2.2. Second phase of CF research
C5, C6, and C10 constituted the intellectual bases for the second
phase of CF research in the average year of 2011, supporting the de-
velopment of research frontier of ghg emission, multi-region input-output
analysis and eastern canada. C5 and C1 were closely linked by two key
articles Thomassen et al. (2008) and de de Vries and de Boer (2010)
(Fig. S13), because the livestock sector is an important determinant of
human health and diet, in addition to milk products, scholars also focus
on other livestock products’ environmental impacts, e.g., pork, chicken,
beef, and eggs, etc. (de Vries and de Boer, 2010). Pelletier et al. (2010)
held that impacts per live-weight kg of beef produced were higher than
pasture-finished beef for the cumulative energy use, ecological foot-
print, greenhouse gas emissions and eutrophying emissions at the as-
suming equilibrium conditions in soil organic carbon fluxes across
systems, and lower than for feedlot-finished beef. Nevertheless, the
environmental cost will not keep within limits the increasing demand
for livestock products, hence these livestock food chains are bound to
major contributors of GE (Gerber et al., 2013), which was emphasized
by IPCC (2006).
C6 was closely connected to C0 through Peters and Hertwich (2008)
and Minx et al. (2009) (Fig. S14), how to standardize the application of
MRIO model and bring together the rigorous economic modeling and
the practice of GHG accounting at various levels were discussed in this
intellectual base (Wiedmann 2009). Minx et al. (2009) and their re-
search team (some authors are from C0) took the UK as example

Fig. 2. The visualization mapping of co-citation network in S7.

7
R. Chen, et al.
Fig. 3. The cluster visualization mapping of co-citation network in S7.
highlighted the multiple uses of generalised multi-regional input-output
models for carbon footprinting in seven areas of national emissions
inventories and trade, emission drivers, economic sectors, supply
chains, etc. Meanwhile, uncertainty analysis and a time series of ba-
lanced input-output tables were implemented for this case by Lenzen
et al. (2010) and Wiedmann et al. (2010). Druckman and Jackson
(2009) found CE of households in the UK were 15% above 1990 levels
in 2004 based around a quasi-MRIO model, and recreation and leisure
accounted for over one-quarter of total emissions. A fully coupled MRIO
model based on global economic data in 2004 (consisting of 113
countries or regions and 57 industry sectors) was used in consumption-
based accounting of CE, the result showed 23% of global emissions
were traded internationally in 2004 (Davis and Caldeira, 2010).
C10 is the growth of the C1 intellectual base that focusing on re-
gional differences or comparison in milk production systems, and they
were linked through Rotz et al. (2010) and Flysjö et al. (2011) (Fig.
S15). Rotz et al. (2010) designed a software tool called the Dairy
Greenhouse Gas model to calculate the CF of different dairy production
systems for each state in the United States and obtained the value of
0.37 to 0.69 kg of CO2-eq units/kg in energy-corrected milk, which
depend upon milk production level and the feeding and manure
handling strategies used. From the perspective of historical practice, the
CF per billion kilograms of milk produced in modern US dairy pro-
duction in 2007 was 37% of equivalent milk production in 1944
8
Ecological Indicators 120 (2021) 106882
(Capper et al., 2009). O’Brien et al. (2014) indicated that if GE was only
attributed to milk, CF from the Irish grass-based system was 5% lower
than the UK confinement system, and 7% lower than the US confine-
ment system based on LCA methods. Furthermore, Eastern Canada was
taken as a typical CF research case of milk products in extensive citing
literature because most dairying occurs in this area in Canada (Mc
Geough et al., 2012).
4.2.3. Third phase of CF research
The intellectual bases of CF research frontier in the third phase
(pisco production, ecological footprint and economy-wide hybrid lca) were
constituted by C2, C7 and C11, respectively. Choosing a more en-
vironmentally-friendly livestock product in a diet can mitigate the en-
vironmental impact (de Vries and de Boer, 2010), while scholars were
not limited to exploring the CF of livestock products in C1, 5 and 10.
The impact of human food consumption (especially Pisco) on the en-
vironment was extensively discussed in C2, which was connected with
C5 by de Vries and de Boer (2010) and Röös et al. (2013) (Fig. S16). A
consumption-oriented life cycle perspective favors understanding the
environmental implications of dietary choices and resulting consump-
tion patterns (Heller et al., 2013), based on this, Notarnicola et al.
(2017) indicated the meat products (beef, pork and poultry) and dairy
products (cheese, milk and butter) were with the highest environmental
burden after the assessed environmental impact of the average food
R. Chen, et al. Ecological Indicators 120 (2021) 106882

Fig. 4. The time-line visualization mapping of co-citation network in S7.

Table 6 Peters et al. (2011) (Fig. S17). Although international trade is a sig-
Clustering parameters of co-citation network in S7. nificant factor in explaining not only the changes in regional CE (Peters
Cluster ID Size Silhouette Mean Cluster ID Size Silhouette Mean et al., 2011) but also the various environmental pressures caused by a
(year) (year) nation’s consumption of goods and services (Steen-Olsen et al., 2012),
the importance of trade chains as a driver of threats to species is poorly
#0 (C0) 22 0.947 2008 #7 (C7) 12 0.956 2012
understood (Lenzen et al., 2012a,b) and even obscured the causal re-
#1 (C1) 16 0.919 2008 #8 (C8) 12 0.945 2013
#2 (C2) 16 0.955 2012 #9 (C9) 11 0.933 2013
lationships in biodiversity loss (Weinzettel et al., 2013). As a result,
#3 (C3) 15 0.93 2013 #10 (C10) 11 0.985 2011 more and more footprint indicators are being incorporated into the
#4 (C4) 15 0.961 2008 #11 (C11) 10 0.952 2012 estimation of the environmental burden caused by international trade,
#5 (C5) 14 0.983 2011 #12 (C12) 9 0.879 2009 e.g., carbon footprint, water footprint, biodiversity footprint, land
#6 (C6) 13 0.956 2011
footprint, etc. This package of footprint indicators is integrated into the
framework of sustainability measurement (Čuček et al., 2012), which is
consumption of European citizens. An estimated 80% increase in global defined as “Footprint Family” by Galli et al. (2012) and Fang et al.
(2014). Steen-Olsen et al. (2012) used the MRIO model to quantify the
agricultural GE if these diets higher in refined sugars, refined fats and
meats would be not controlled (Tilman and Clark, 2014). The dietary total environmental pressures characterized by footprint family in-
dicators found that an average EU citizen in 2004 consumed 13.3 t CO2-
change could reduce 50% GE and land use demand in areas with an
affluent diet (Hallström et al., 2015). Therefore, shifting diets and re- eq, 2.53 gha and 179 m3 of blue water in their consumption activities.
Case Studies of hybrid LCA application constituted the intellectual
ducing waste, especially, away from diets rich in GHG-intensive meat
and dairy foods is a task of top priority (Garnett, 2011; Foley et al., base of C11, which related to C0 through Wiedmann et al. (2007) and
Miller and Blair (2009) (Fig. S18). Lenzen et al. (2012a,b) applied the
2011). Whether the environmental burden of food consumption could
be represented by the CF indicator is queried because some environ- environmentally extended MRIO tables in LCA, the high country and
sector detail drastically improved the resolution of LCA. Weber and
mental impacts do not change with climate change, especially those
related to emissions of toxic substances (Laurent et al., 2012). Matthews (2008) indicated that transportation represented only 11% of
life-cycle GE associated with food production in the United States and
C7 was linked with C6 through Davis and Caldeira (2010) and

9
R. Chen, et al.
final delivery from producer to retail contributed only 4% through the
method utilized of hybrid LCA. More similar case studies appeared in
the citing literature in recent years (Figs. 3 and 4).
4.2.4. Fourth phase of CF research
C3, 8 and 9 were the fourth phase intellectual bases of CF research
with the corresponding research fronts of loess plateau, global land-water
nexus, and household consumption. C3 tightly connected both with C2
and C12 (Fig. S19), it makes sense if combine with the analysis above,
which were all concerned about the impact of climate change on food
security. 19–29% of global anthropogenic GE came from the food sys-
tems in 2008, in which the agricultural production contributed 80–86%
(Vermeulen et al., 2012). Clune et al. (2017) reviewed 369 published
studies with the food categories of fresh vegetables, fresh fruits, staples,
dairy, non-ruminant livestock and ruminant livestock (168 varieties of
fresh produce) found that meat from ruminants having the highest
impact on GWP but grains, fruit and vegetables having the lowest. GE
from 24 Indian food items showed that ME mostly came from the an-
imal food products and rice cultivation, and food products from crops
accounted for the most NE (Pathak et al., 2010). Climate change, in
turn, poses a threat to food production in agricultural yields and
earnings, food quality, and, notably, food safety (Vermeulen et al.,
2012), which has aroused Chinese scholars’ close attention to the eco-
logically fragile areas, especially the Loess Plateau in China (Figs. 3 and
4). Historical statistical studies in CF of crop production from China
provide the intellectual bases for this topic, e.g., the high frequency
cited documents from Cheng et al. (2011), Yan et al. (2015) and Cheng
et al. (2015).
C8 was linked with C11 through two articles of the same author:
Lenzen et al. (2012a,b) and Lenzen et al. (2013) (Fig. S20), who is
committed to compiling large-scale global MRIO tables that represent
all countries at a detailed sectoral level and provide information on data
reliability. Resource flows and environmental burdens are proposed to
be included in global MRIO tables with the emergence of footprint fa-
mily accounting indicators, and the European Union attaches great
importance to these footprint indicators in its Resource-efficiency
roadmap (Tukker et al., 2016). Similarly, Wood et al. (2015) focused on
environmental activities and constructed a global MRIO database
(EXIOBASE), which allowed for more details of consumption footprints.
Moreover, the construction of the World Input-Output Tables (WIOTs)
was described by Dietzenbacher et al. (2013). Due to the convenience of
accessing these input–output databases, using a “footprint” perspective
to capture the global dimension of resources and their impacts is
paramount in understanding the sustainability, efficiency, and equity of
resource use (Hoekstra and Wiedmann, 2014; Tukker et al., 2016),
because the sole use of current resource productivity indicators in
policymaking is called into question (Wiedmann et al., 2015). There-
fore, these provide an opportunity to estimate the maximum sustain-
able footprint levels and improve the efficiency of natural resource
utilization (water, land, material and climate, etc.), ensuring that the
anthropogenic perturbation levels of the earth system are within the
proposed Planetary Boundary (Steffen et al., 2015).
The CF of household consumption and its drivers were discussed in
C9, in which the intellectual base was linked with C6 through Davis and
Caldeira (2010) and Minx et al. (2013) (Fig. S21). Minx et al. (2013)
used a hybrid method to estimate the human settlements CF in the UK
found that 90% of the areas were net importers of CE, and the CF in
urban was higher than rural settlement types, although the CF mainly
determined by socio-economic, income was not the most important
driver. In contrast, Ivanova et al. (2017) calculated the CF associated
with household consumption for 177 regions in 27 EU countries and
indicated income was the most important driver for a region’s CF. Be-
sides, significant differences were in the size and composition of CF
between geographic regions when the typical U.S. households CF was
calculated in 28 cities for 6 household sizes and 12 income brackets by
Jones and Kammen (2011).
10
Ecological Indicators 120 (2021) 106882
4.3. Potential frontier in the future CF research
Using the co-occurrence analysis function of terms in Citespace to
detect hot topics in CF research, where the term words drew Title,
Abstract, Descriptors, and Identifiers from 6402 refined data. Compared
with previous studies that only focus on Keywords, the terms can pe-
netrate deeper into the content of the literature and get more com-
prehensive information. Besides, the function of “Burst Phrases” was
used to select the term words (1478 burst terms detected with S1). As it
was shown in Table S3, frontier topics formed by clustering above were
distributed among these term words, e.g., “Based-life-cycle”, “Life-
cycle-stages”, “Life-cycle-inventory”, “System-boundary” and “Attribu-
tional-life-cycle-assessment”, which were interrelated with C0, 4 10 and
11; “GHG-emission”, “Raw-milk-production”, “Livestock-production”
and “Beef-production” were closely related to C1, 5 and 10; “Food-
systems”, “Food-supply-chain”, “Dietary-choices” and “Grain-produc-
tion” has been referred to a great extent in C2, C3 and C5, etc., ob-
viously, the research fronts were condensed in these hot topics. Those
hot spots that had not been integrated into the cluster cannot be sup-
ported by the intellectual base due to the lack of emerging citing lit-
erature, which shows that in all likelihood they are turning into the
potential frontier in future research.
First of all, for the future CF accounting method, more attention
should be paid to eliminating the uncertainty of the accounting process,
such as improving system boundaries and data quality to obtain the
accuracy of accounting results. Using a hybrid approach to integrate the
PA and input-output methodologies is strongly recommended by many
scholars (Lenzen et al., 2000; Suh et al., 2004; Wiedmann and Minx,
2008), such a Hybrid-EIO-LCA allows to retain the advantages of both
methods. Secondly, the application scope of CF indicators in economic
and policy analysis needs to be continuously expanded and strength-
ened. At present, CF is gradually used as a representative indicator to be
absorbed into environmental sustainability assessment for various
products, e.g., with consideration of producing more with less en-
vironmental impact, resource utilization efficiency can be measured by
joint application of LCA and Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA)
(Rebolledo-Leiva et al., 2017, 2019). Thirdly, the theme of fairness will
continue to be valued in the CF application field in the future. There is
no doubt that the principle of common but differentiated responsi-
bilities and respective capabilities was established in early climate
change negotiations by the United Nations Framework Convention on
Climate Change (UNFCCC), which is essential for the burden-sharing
and responsibilities on the basis of equity. However, complete fairness
is difficult to achieve in climate policy practice because the problem of
carbon leakage is hidden between international trade (Kander et al.,
2015), which poses a challenge to the UNFCCC for its determination of
GHG inventories at the boundary of the territorial system (Peters,
2008). The perspective of consumption-based CF has questioned the
global climate mechanism to a certain extent and provides an in-
novative direction.
Specifically, in addition to the environmental impact of climate
change, CF has shown great vitality in the cross-application of agri-
culture (10 closely related terms in Table S3) and energy (9 closely
related terms in Table S3). The waste management should be given
more attention in future CF research (Food-waste-management, Was-
tewater-treatment and Agricultural-waste in Table S3), which was also
emphasized in the latest research of He et al. (2019). In combination
with other ecological footprints, CF also as a member of the “Footprint
Family”, jointly tracking human pressure on the planet and under dif-
ferent angles (Galli et al., 2012; Fang et al., 2014). All of this indicates
that the CF will grow rapidly in the field of interdisciplinary research.
5. Conclusions
With the collected literature information records from the WoS, a
bibliometric analysis of CF research was conducted to clarify the
R. Chen, et al.
relationship in complex citation networks and the development trend of
the knowledge domain in a certain period. There are significant dif-
ferences in CF research in terms of spatial and temporal layout and
cooperation intensity. In particular, the scientific definition for the term
“carbon footprint” emerged in 2006, mostly in the form of Article,
Meeting and Patent distributed in the field of Engineering,
Environmental sciences ecology, Science technology other topics,
Energy fuels, Computer science and Business economics. There was a
certain degree of cooperation between the authors, and the top 10
authors in CF retrieval records also have high-frequency cooperative
relationships with other authors in the cooperative network. The
Chinese Academy of Sciences ranked with a high volume of publica-
tions and strong cooperation with international institutions, which
showed the core force of CF research. The regional layout of the CF
research forces was Europe, North America and Asia, and the United
States of America, China, England, Australia and Italy ranked in the top
5.
The application characteristics of the CF indicator have formed its
own knowledge domain. Specifically, 81 key pieces of literature and 13
knowledge clusters were discovered by choosing an ideal map for co-
citation analysis. Intellectual bases of CF research emerged on average
in 2008–2013 supported 13 CF research fronts in 4 phases, specifically
summarized as follows: Debate and application of CF accounting
method (C0, 4, 6 and 11), Case Studies of CF for livestock and its
products production (C1 and 10), CF estimation for the final con-
sumption of goods and services (C12 and 3), Impact of human food
consumption on the climate change (C2 and 3), Application of Footprint
Family for sustainable development (C7 and 8), CF estimation for
household consumption and its drivers (C9). Although which type of
the model is most suitable for CF accounting depends on the research
purpose of the particular application, the MRIO models and Hybrid-
EIO-LCA evaluation methods are becoming increasingly popular in CF
accounting. Similarly, the CF has turned into essential in linking climate
change with dietary structure and food security, as well as the assess-
ment of the sustainability, efficiency, and equity of resource use.
Besides, CF showed great vitality in the cross-application of agriculture
and energy, and related hot topics in all likelihood are turning into the
potential frontier in future research.
The shape of visualization maps dynamically generated by Citespace
are not always consistent, even though they come from the same data
filtering strategy, nevertheless, their graphic structures are identical,
which can be verified from parameters such as Nodes, Links, Density, or
MQ and MS values (upper left corner of the illustration), thus ensuring
the reliability and repeatability of the conclusion of the knowledge map
analysis. In this paper, we used the S7 scheme to regenerate the vi-
sualization mapping of the co-citation network (Fig. S22) and cluster
visualization mapping of the co-citation network (Fig. S23) corre-
sponding to Figs. 2 and 3 for verification. Therefore, it is essential to
draw more attention to the normative application of CiteSpace.
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial
interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influ-
ence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgments
We deeply appreciate Dr. Arturas Kaklauskas and the reviewers for
their efforts and dedication to improving this manuscript. We pay our
highest tribute to all who are fighting the Corona Virus Disease 2019
(COVID-19).
11
Ecological Indicators 120 (2021) 106882
Funding
This work was supported by the Project funded by China
Postdoctoral Science Foundation [grant number 2020M671776].
Appendix A. Supplementary data
Supplementary data to this article can be found online at https://
doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolind.2020.106882.
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