A Bibliometric Analysis on LCA in Assessment of Technology and System Options

Abstract

The explosive increase in the state-of-the-art knowledge and case examples on life cycle assessment has made their comprehensive understandings much difficult. While the attainable system options on society, economic, and technology are complexly intertwined with each other, the viewpoints of their assessment have also been diversified. In this study, the requirements on technology assessments based on life cycle thinking are discussed through a bibliometric analysis of existing academic papers. Academic landscape system was applied for the bibliometric analysis of 19,327 papers including article, review, and letter published on Web of Science containing the terms, i.e., “life cycle assessment”, “life cycle analysis”, or “life cycle thinking” in their title, keyword, or abstract. The citation networks among the papers were visualized as clusters by text mining and network analysis for four groups based on the publication periods, i.e., – 2005, 2006 – 2010, 2011 – 2015, and 2016 – 2019. Since the target products, i.e., food, renewable energy, and biomass, and viewpoints, i.e., land use, water use and consumption, and the nexus among indicators, have become more and more complicated and diversified, it is definitely vital to address the adequate settings of methods, system boundary, functional unit, and data collection.