A comparative bibliometric analysis of Chinese and foreign articles in environmental footprint family (EFF) research

Research on environmental footprint family (EFF), including these studies of environmental footprints and footprint family, has been widely applied to environmental impact assessment and sustainability evaluation. Although some bibliometric studies have focused on footprint indicators, there is still the lack of the contrast of Chinese and foreign literature in the field of EFF and the conclusions of successful practices at home and abroad in recent years. Unlike most previous papers, we improve the search strategy for collecting accurate documents data and compare China and foreign from a unified international perspective. Two datasets covering 1103 Chinese and 6011 foreign articles between 1996 and 2019 were collected to compare their bibliometric differences in EFF research. We not only comparatively investigate the overview of Chinese and foreign articles in EFF field based on the objects of publications, journals, authors, and institutions, but also explore their differences in the conceptual and intellectual structure from the aspects of keywords and citation analysis. For example, we can deduce that Chinese articles tend to engage in applied research and lack of theoretical innovations and breakthroughs in this field. Our comparative research results are useful and helpful for the public, policymakers, and researchers in this filed.