Tracking the evolution of waste recycling research using overlay maps of science.

By Ismael Rafols, Loet Leydesdorff, Alice O'Hare, Paul Nightingale, Andrew Stirling. Waste Management, 2011

408 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Tracking the evolution of research in waste recycling science (WRS) can be valuable for environmental agencies, as well as for recycling businesses. Maps of science are visual, easily readable representations of the cognitive structure of a branch of science, a particular area of research or the global spectrum of scientific production. They are generally built upon evidence collected from reliable sources of information, such as patent and scientific publication databases. This study uses the methodology developed by Rafols et al. (2010) to make a "double overlay map" of WRS upon a basemap reflecting the cognitive structure of all journal-published science, for the years 2005 and 2010. The analysis has taken into account the cognitive areas where WRS articles are published and the areas from where it takes its intellectual nourishing, paying special attention to the growing trends of the key areas. Interpretation of results lead to the conclusion that extraction of energy from waste will probably be an important research topic in the future, along with developments in general chemistry and chemical engineering oriented to the recovery of valuable materials from waste. Agricultural and material sciences, together with the combined economics, politics and geography field, are areas with which WRS shows a relevant and ever increasing cognitive relationship.

Subfields: Building and Construction, Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/baa31d6fb9a01537c883e42fdd37bcf6fb8b607c

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Citations in the corpus

Toward a taxonomy of career studies through bibliometric visualization (2014, background): “…for sciencemapping, including visualization of the research on renewable energies (Rizzi, van Eck, & Frey, 2014), the relations between journals in the business field (Rafols et al., 2012), and the topics covered in the editorials of Nature and Science (Waaijer, van Bochove, & van Eck, 2010, 2011).”
Deep impact: unintended consequences of journal rank (2013, background): “There is also evidence from one study in economics suggesting that journal rank can contribute to suppression of interdisciplinary research (Rafols et al., 2012), keeping disciplines separate and isolated.”
Prominent but Less Productive (2015, methodology): “She received her Ph.D. in management from the Paul Merage School of Business at the University of California, Irvine.”
Evaluation practices and effects of indicator use : a literature review (2016, background): “In a first comparative analysis of the effect of these rankings in business and innovation studies, they were found to be biased against interdisciplinary work (Rafols et al. 2012).”