The knowledge dissemination trajectory research of the carbon footprint domain: a main path analysis

The global warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions has received widespread attention from all around the world. In this regard, how to calculate the carbon footprint (CF) scientifically and accurately produced by human activities to achieve emission reduction goals has been widely discussed by scholars. In recent years, related research on this issue has increased, leading to a significant expand in the number of publications. It is necessary to excavate and summarize the current development status and possible future trends of this field based on quantitative methods. To achieve this goal, this paper develops a main path analysis (MPA) of the entire field and three research sub-topics (agriculture, energy fuels, and business economic) based on the 4973 papers extracted from Web of Science (WoS) database. The results show that the CF domain mainly focuses on optimizing the CF calculation methods from a theoretical perspective to improve the accuracy of estimation. Furthermore, scholars engaged in the agricultural research mainly focus on adjusting the life cycle assessment (LCA) model, which has advantage on microlevel CF accounting, according to actual needs to achieve more accurate predictions, while researchers who pay attention to the topic of business economic are committed to improving the input-output model, which is suitable for meso and macro analysis, to enhance accounting accuracy. In general, this article is beneficial for presenting the intellectual structure and knowledge diffusion trajectories of the CF domain from horizontal and vertical perspectives.