Evolution and structure of sustainability science
Top Cited Papers
- 23 November 2011
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
- Vol. 108 (49), 19540-19545
- https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1102712108
Abstract
The concepts of sustainable development have experienced extraordinary success since their advent in the 1980s. They are now an integral part of the agenda of governments and corporations, and their goals have become central to the mission of research laboratories and universities worldwide. However, it remains unclear how far the field has progressed as a scientific discipline, especially given its ambitious agenda of integrating theory, applied science, and policy, making it relevant for development globally and generating a new interdisciplinary synthesis across fields. To address these questions, we assembled a corpus of scholarly publications in the field and analyzed its temporal evolution, geographic distribution, disciplinary composition, and collaboration structure. We show that sustainability science has been growing explosively since the late 1980s when foundational publications in the field increased its pull on new authors and intensified their interactions. The field has an unusual geographic footprint combining contributions and connecting through collaboration cities and nations at very different levels of development. Its decomposition into traditional disciplines reveals its emphasis on the management of human, social, and ecological systems seen primarily from an engineering and policy perspective. Finally, we show that the integration of these perspectives has created a new field only in recent years as judged by the emergence of a giant component of scientific collaboration. These developments demonstrate the existence of a growing scientific field of sustainability science as an unusual, inclusive and ubiquitous scientific practice and bode well for its continued impact and longevity.Keywords
This publication has 19 references indexed in Scilit:
- Cities: The century of the cityNature, 2010
- Scientific discovery and topological transitions in collaboration networksJournal of Informetrics, 2009
- Clickstream Data Yields High-Resolution Maps of SciencePLOS ONE, 2009
- The power of a good idea: Quantitative modeling of the spread of ideas from epidemiological modelsPhysica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2006
- Studying the emerging global brain: Analyzing and visualizing the impact of co‐authorship teamsComplexity, 2005
- CHARACTERIZING ANDMEASURINGSUSTAINABLEDEVELOPMENTAnnual Review of Environment and Resources, 2003
- Sustainability ScienceScience, 2001
- Mathematical Approach to the Prediction of Scientific DiscoveryNature, 1971
- Mathematical Approach to the Spread of Scientific Ideas—the History of Mast Cell ResearchNature, 1966
- Generalization of Epidemic Theory: An Application to the Transmission of IdeasNature, 1964